fair use and plagiarism: redfined?

A good piece from salon.com by Emma Mustich on the ethics of fair use -- and the ways in which the internet -- and our own brains -- have muddied the waters. The post features the opinions of several professions in fields -- from music to fashion to journalism -- where copying the words or ideas of others is often an issueBottom line: when in doubt, don't.

Here's a taste:

Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University

The core of what plagiarism is remains undented by the digital publishing environment. Copying out the words of others and passing them off as your own is still what it always was; wholesale plagiarism is a sacking offense in most newsrooms. It is of course much easier to detect now, thanks to Google text search, but beyond the clear example of screeds of lifted text or images passed off as your own, the issue of who is a plagiarist is also a little more porous at the edges than it was.

In digital journalism, one of the most valuable functions you can perform is to aggregate and link to the content produced by others. We do however also see the problems of “over aggregation,” where credit and sourcing is not clear enough, links are missing, attribution is fuzzy and where the idea of “fair use” is enormously stretched. Is this plagiarism or enthusiastic aggregation?

The increased ease of detection of plagiarism is offset against the temptation to “over aggregate.” As for the broader context of taking ideas and presenting them as new, well, that happens all the time, sometimes knowingly and sometimes accidentally. It is an area where journalism is still thrashing out standards and best practice; there is a sort of arms race of transparency going on in digital news filtering at the moment – who did what first and when. I can’t help feeling that the idea of a plagiarism algorithm is not too far away.

don't forget the WWW's

"Rhymes with Orange" by hilary price


Hmmmm. I wonder if this is fair use? Should it be? bk

whose use is fair use?

GeeWhy forwards this link to an NYT article on copyright wars between Google-owned YouTube and users who post home videos that, for example, may include a cover of a copyrighted hit. The story suggests that in the digital age, the definition of "fair use" is in flux.

From the article:

The situation has raised anew questions about the meaning of fair use under copyright law in the context of the digital age, when anyone can easily excerpt copyrighted works and distribute the result in a manner that is sometimes hard to identify as being a commercial product.

Last year Dustin McLean, who works as an animator on Current TV’s comedy show “Super News,” posted a video of A-Ha’s 1980s hit “Take On Me.” But it was Mr. McLean singing, not the real lyrics but about what was actually happening in the video. He got two million views in three months, and a new genre was born, called “literal videos.”

“It was just a silly idea,” he said. When the video was removed, he said, “fans started e-mailing me and asking, ‘why did you take down your video?’”

His videos can now been seen on funnyordie.com or his own site, dustfilms.com, and so far he has been free from the copyright police.

The law provides a four-point test for the fair use of copyrighted works, taking into account things like the purpose, the size of an excerpt and the effect the use might have on the commercial value of the actual work.

The body of law is ever-evolving, and each era and technology seems to force new interpretations. In the 1960s, for example, the Zapruder film, the home movie that captured the Kennedy assassination, was bought and copyrighted by Time magazine. But a judge denied that it could be a copyrighted work because of its value to the public interest.

But GeeWhy sees this particular clash in a different light, suggesting it gets close to the crux of the problem responsible for the current newspaper death march. He writes:

This story is often framed as the old fossils in the music
industry not understanding the digital age and attacking innocent kids
who post their singing on youtube with no desire to make money off it.
But it's really an issue between the industry and google/youtube, which
makes an estimated $500 million off ads connected to the youtube
uploads. The record industry is trying to come to some sort of financial
arrangement with google, just as the newspaper industry should be trying to come to some sort of agreement with them. As I've said many times, Google is making a fortune off free content from the music industry and journalism. They then cleverly try to make this an issue of innocent bloggers/youtubers getting harassed by big industries. (Groups like the Electronic Freedom Foundation play right along with their dubious claims that everyone will make money if only everything were free; they use the lame argument that people viewing or reading something somehow magically translates into ad dollars.) But google just doesn't want to pay for their free content. The press is not doing a good job of framing this issue. Take this article...it starts with an anecdotal lede about a cute 14 year old getting threatened with a lawsuit. It's not until the end of the article that the real issue is touched on — google making money off content they get for free and don't want to pay for.

From a PR standpoint, this is a horrible situation for newspapers and
the music industry. Both have enjoyed near monopoly status. Both have
made horrible business decisions. And nearly all consumers now have much better alternatives than the old days. (This nostalgia for the old days of corporate newspapers is a bit much; most papers were/are pretty awful.) But this should really be framed as a battle between artists and writers, most of whom make very little money, versus Google. Not corporate media versus 14 year olds singing songs on youtube.