Prince
Why Copyright Law Must Change
In early February 2007, Stephanie Lenz’s 13-month-old son started dancing. Pushing a walker across her kitchen floor, Holden Lenz started moving to the distinctive beat of a song by Prince, “Let’s Go Crazy.” He had heard the song before. The beat had obviously stuck. So when Holden heard the song again, he did what any sensible 13-month-old would do — he accepted Prince’s invitation and went “crazy” to the beat. Holden’s mom grabbed her camcorder and, for 29 seconds, captured the priceless image of Holden dancing, with the barely discernible Prince playing on a CD player somewhere in the background.
Ms. Lenz wanted her mother to see the film. But you can’t easily email a movie. So she did what any citizen of the 21st century would do: She uploaded the file to YouTube and sent her relatives and friends the link. They watched the video scores of times. It was a perfect YouTube moment: a community of laughs around a homemade video, readily shared with anyone who wanted to watch.
Sometime over the next four months, however, someone from Universal Music Group also watched Holden dance. Universal manages the copyrights of Prince. It fired off a letter to YouTube demanding that it remove the unauthorized “performance” of Prince’s music. YouTube, to avoid liability itself, complied. A spokeswoman for YouTube declined to comment.
This sort of thing happens all the time today. Companies like YouTube are deluged with demands to remove material from their systems. No doubt a significant portion of those demands are fair and justified. Universal’s demand, however, was not. The quality of the recording was terrible. No one would download Ms. Lenz’s video to avoid paying Prince for his music. There was no plausible way in which Prince or Universal was being harmed by Holden Lenz.
Revisiting ideas from his TED talk last year, Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig posts an article in the Wall Street Journal outlining how and why copyright law must change. This is a must-read for anyone who creates and shares anything in the 21st century.
Comedy Central Back on YouTube
The Daily Show sums up Bush speeches.
After suing YouTube, NBC signed a deal with YouTube. Now after having their clips pulled off YouTube over the weekend, Comedy Central’s owner Viacom signs a deal with YouTube. Do you see a pattern emerging here?
You gotta love YouTube’s data retention practices. Pulled clips just magically reappeared, stats and all. Here’s what Viacom had to say about it.
We want our audiences to be able to access our programming on every platform and we’re interested in having it live on all forms of distribution in ways that protect our talented artists, our loyal customers and our passionate audiences.
Of course, Viacom asserting copyright right after Google’s purchase of YouTube raises questions of sincerity.
A YouTube user questions Comedy Central’s motives.
Greed aside, it’s good to see Viacom gets this video thing. For a moment there, I was gonna bash them for having their clips pulled off. In the words of VC Paul Graham:
The big media companies shouldn’t worry that people will post their copyrighted material on YouTube. They should worry that people will post their own stuff on YouTube, and audiences will watch that instead.
In celebration of this landmark deal, enjoy a few of my favorite Comedy Central YouTube clips, supersized for your pleasure. Click here to continue reading “Comedy Central Back on YouTube”…
