copyright

Bullies haven’t been cool since Biff Tannen graced our presence, and even he wasn’t the brightest crayon in the box.  North Face has proven they’re not quite the cool guys in school like many may have believed them to be.  When 18-year-old Jimmy Winkelmann created a parody brand, “South Butt,” North Face decided to file a lawsuit against the teenager rather than laughing along with the joke.

The story became viral most recently when South Butt released a Facebook app that allows you to use your judgment to see if you can "tell a butt from a face."  The popularity of the app strengthens South Butt’s case that their brand is truly a mere parody and proves that the class clown can sometimes come out ahead of the school bully.

North Face’s decision to sue ultimately ruined their reputation.  Sorry Biff, your days are over.

Post from: The Streisand Effect

Pick on somebody your own size.

It's kind of a sad story.  University of Miami law professor Donald Marvin Jones was arrested in 2007 for soliciting a prostitute.  He denied the claims, and the charges were later dropped.  The law blog AboveTheLaw had written a series of posts about the story and included his faculty photo.  Jones has filed a lawsuit against the blog, claiming that the use of the faculty photo is a copyright violation.

As TechDirt points out, there are two big problems with this:

1 — He likely doesn't hold the copyright on the photo.
2 — Even if he does, it's very clearly a fair use claim.

In the end, it just draws more people to the story.  I had never heard about Mr. Jones or this situation before, but now he's bringing it all back to the forefront.

Post from: The Streisand Effect

D. Marvin Jones can't let it go

Ralph Lauren has a new ad out with an impossibly skinny model in it.  As Boing-Boing put it, "Dude, her head's bigger than her pelvis".

The ad was highlighted on PhotoshopDisasters, as an example of (we really hope) bad Photoshopping.  However, Ralph Lauren filed a (bogus) DMCA takedown notice on the post, which has since been removed.

That's the end of it, right?  Post removed, story gone.  Ha!  BoingBoing has now covered the story, as has the Huffington Post, TechDirt and others.  Ralph Lauren filed a DMCA complaint against BoingBoing, but their ISP (Canada's Priority Colo) knows what they're doing, and didn't remove the post.  They spoke with BoingBoing about it, and decided (rightfully) that the post can stay.

Not only can we all see the insane ad, but we can see just how out of touch Ralph Lauren is.

Post from: The Streisand Effect

Ralph Lauren doesn't like that you don't like their ad

Do you know which is the biggest misconception about duplicate content?

Most of the people think that by publishing content taken from other websites you can incur in duplicate content penalties and loose google rank.

Actually, it doesn’t work like that.

What Google defines as duplicate content penalty is tied to content appearing on a same website on more than one page (be careful, this is valuable also on different subdomains on the same domains).

Anyway, you cannot take anybody’s content and republish it under your own name, this would be against copyright laws.

Let’s see how you should behave following the rules.

If you take an article from an article directory and put it on your website, there will be no duplicate content penalty, if you don’t publish it on more than one page. On the contrary, if the article provides good quality content, Google will love it.

If dealing with articles, be sure to add the resource box along with it, or you will incur in some more serious copyright problems.

This way, the author of the article will love you too, since you’re providing him one more free one-way link.

The same concept works for PLR content, except for the resource box step. In this case you can claim full authorship on the content.

An interesting video I came across about the main issues concerning fair use, copyright, and video mashups. Highlights from my transcription below:

We're seeing this blossoming of amateur cultures, video remixes and creativity, and a lot of these works are circulating on the Internet.

Copyright law is all about balance – giving copyright owners reasonable protection while assuring creators the ability to make new works using old culture.

Fair use protects that ability to create, and it also provides a safe guard against censorship. Not official censorhip, but private censorship by copyright.

Fair use is a right, and as the Supreme Court has recognized, it's rooted in the First Amendment. But like any right, it's reality depends on its exercise: we must use it, or we're losing it.

Codes of best practices help people understand what's fair, what's reasonable, what's normal in their field. That's why they work so well for fair use: because fair use is about reasoning and logic, it's not about just "following the rules".

Other organizations and communities have developed codes of best practices in fair use: documentarian, media literacy teachers. And they found a tremendous difference liberating from their practices.

It's really imperative

Rapidshare is one of the world's largest file-hosting sites with millions of files stored on its servers. Rapidshare is a one click hosting provides paid and free services, owned by German and running from Switzerland. The Regional Court of Hamburg has ruled in favor of German collecting society GEMA, which had requested that the court issue an order prohibiting file-hosting service rapidshare.com from making around 5,000 music tracks available on the Internet. [ Read more ]

The Regional court orders Rapidshare to pay a 34 million dollar fine to GEMA, and to start actively filtering and removing the files it hosts for copyrighted content. Initally the case was brought on by copyright protection association GEMA. The court also mentions the precautions allegedly taken by rapidshare and other file hosting website is not sufficient to prevent copyright issues.

"The judgment states that the hosting service itself is now responsible for making sure that none of the music tracks concerned are distributed via its platform in the future. This means that the copyright holder is no longer required to perform the ongoing and complex checks," mentioned in GEMA declaration.

Bobby Chang, COO of RapidShare AG in Cham (Switzerland)