The “copyleft” and the “copyright” are both applauding the presidential appointment Friday of Victoria A. Espinel to become the nation’s first copyright czar.

Congress created the new czar position last year as part of intellectual property reform legislation.

Espinel, who requires Senate confirmation, has a past in teaching and government. Most recently, she was a visiting scholar at the George Mason University School of Law, where she taught intellectual property and international trade. The White House said she was an intellectual property adviser to the staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senate Finance Committee, House Judiciary Committee and House Ways and Means Committee. Espinel, in 2005, served as the nation’s top trade negotiator for intellectual property at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

The czar’s position is charged with overseeing government anti-piracy crackdowns and, among other things, training other countries about IP enforcement. The Pro-IP Act also called for the creation of an FBI piracy unit and allows for the forfeiture of equipment used in large pirating operations. The legislation was strongly backed by Hollywood, the recording industry, unions, manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce.

Obama Appoints Scholar as New Copyright Czar | Threat Level | Wired.com

Hadley Leggett:

Starting this fall, you'll have a new reason to trust the information you find on Wikipedia: An optional feature called "WikiTrust" will color code every word of the encyclopedia based on the reliability of its author and the length of time it has persisted on the page.

Called WikiTrust, the program assigns a color code to newly edited text using an algorithm that calculates author reputation from the lifespan of their past contributions. It's based on a simple concept: The longer information persists on the page, the more accurate it's likely to be.

"They've hit on the fundamentally Darwinian nature of Wikipedia," said Wikipedia software developer and neuroscientist Virgil Griffith of the California Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the project.

Noteworthy writes: It's pretty egregious that neither Wired nor the WikiTrust folks bothered to mention the Puppy Smoothies paper, which was published in 2006, a year before the earliest citations on the WikiTrust site. (Why didn't Virgil mention this?)

The reliability of information collected from at large Internet users by open collaborative wikis such as Wikipedia has been a subject of widespread debate. This paper provides a practical proposal for improving user confidence in wiki information by coloring the text of a wiki article based on the venerability of the text. This proposal relies on the philosophy that bad information is less likely to survive a collaborative editing process over large numbers of edits. Colorization would provide users with a clear visual cue as to the level of confidence that they can place in particular assertions made within a wiki article.

Decius: Noteworthy later points out that the Wikitrust people did reference my paper in their first paper. I'm really happy to see these ideas making it into practice regardless of how much credit I'm getting. I pushed the ball a little bit forward but these guys have taken it all the way and thats awesome. Congrats Wikitrust!

Wikipedia adopts Text Coloring for Trust Idea that Decius helped develop

Quoted below is Tom's reply to the DMCA take-down notice that Texas Instruments sent:

Mr. Foster,

This afternoon I received an email from you, attached below, which orders me to remove a post from my blog at www.memestreams.net about the cracking of the TI-83 OS Signing Key. Upon receiving your email I removed the post you reference from MemeStreams. However, I do not think that the post you referenced on MemeStreams violates Texas Instruments' intellectual property. Your email does not make clear what aspect of my post you object to, and because it was so vague I suspect you may have emailed me without taking the time to properly digest the context and purpose of my post.

I am a professional computer security researcher. My personal blog on MemeStreams is a place were I regularly comment on matters relevant to computer security in both the technical and policy realm. The purpose of my post about the TI-83 signing key was to report the fact that the key had been cracked, to explain why I felt that event was important and unprecedented, to discuss the implications of that event for the practice of computer security, and to consider potential events that might follow in the future.

Absolutely nothing about my post was intended to encourage or facilitate the violation of Texas Instrument's Intellectual Property. I did not include specific information, such as the numeric keys, which might have facilitated that. Frankly, I don't care about calculator operating systems and neither does anyone else who reads my blog. My interest in the subject is purely academic - its about the implications that this event has for the greater practice of computer security.

I did provide hyperlinks to the forums where the crack was discussed, but I did so only because those are the primary sources that demonstrate that the event that I was reporting on did, in fact, actually happen. While the DMCA has been used to prohibit people from providing hyperlinks in the past, this has only been done in the context where the purpose of providing those hyperlinks was to facilitate infringement. Nothing about my post encourages infringement. In my case the purpose of providing the links was to accurately report the news.

I have a constitutional right to report the news. I have a right to report that this event occurred, to explain what web forums it occurred in, and explain what implications I think it has. This is no different from a newspaper reporting that a murder occurred, reporting what street it occurred on, and explaining why their readers should care. The DMCA does not curtail these fundamental constitutional rights.

I sympathize with your position Mr. Foster. In fact, the post you asked me to remove predicted that Texas Instruments might pursue legal action against the people who are attempting to violate their intellectual property. However, I am not one of those people and I ever expected to receive a legal threat from you. As your email does not make clear what aspect of my post you object to, I've been forced to remove the post in its entirety. I feel this is a significant trespass upon my First Amendment rights and I presume that it could only have happened in error.

Please take a moment to carefully reconsider the position you've taken here.

Thank you,
Tom Cross

TI is seriously overreaching. Their actions in regard to Tom should not be (and may not be) legal.

TI just kicked the hornet's nest.

Response to Texas Instruments DMCA Notice

David Ross and Ed Colbert debate the copyright issues surrounding Shepard Fairey's Obama poster. (06:37)

This segment on the Colbert Report is one of the most clued discussions about a copyright matter I've ever seen on TV. If you follow copyleft issues, this is pure candy.

Obama Poster Debate - David Ross and Ed Colbert | February 12th | ColbertNation.com

YouTube on Tuesday rebuffed a request from John McCain s presidential campaign to examine fair-use issues more carefully before yanking campaign videos in response to DMCA takedown notices.

Lawyers and judges constantly disagree about what does and does not constitute fair-use, YouTube s general counsel Zahavah Levine wrote in a letter Tuesday. No number of lawyers could possibly determine with a reasonable level of certainty whether all the videos for which we receive disputed takedown notices qualify as fair-use.

We hope that as a content uploader, you have gained a sense of some of the challenges we face everyday in operating YouTube, she added. Mccainyoutubead

The McCain campaign on Monday fired off a letter to YouTube complaining that the company had acted too quickly to take down McCain s videos in response to copyright infringement notices. McCain campaign general counsel Trevor Potter argued that several of the removed ads, which had used excerpts of television footage, fall under the four-factor doctrine of fair-use, and shouldn t have been removed.

But citing the DMCA, a controversial copyright law that McCain voted to approve a decade ago, Levine pointed out that YouTube risks being sued itself if it doesn t respond PROMPTly to takedown notices.

If … service providers do not remove the content to such notice, they do so at their own risk because they lose their safe harbor, she wrote.

Further, Levine argued, the fair-use analysis is complicated, and the creators of the videos are better equipped to perform it. The uploader can then issue a DMCA counter-notice if they believe they re on solid legal ground, and YouTube will restore the video.

YouTube does not possess the requisite information about the content in user-uploaded videos to make a determination as to whether a particular takedown notice includes a valid claim of infringement, Levine wrote. The claimant and the uploader, not YouTube, hold all of the relevant information in this regard, including the source of any content used, the ownership rights to the content, and any licensing arrangements in place between the parties.

The real problem here is individuals and entities that abuse the DMCA takedown process, she added.

We look forward to working with Senator or President McCain on ways to combat abuse of the DMCA takedown process on YouTube, including by way of example, strengthening the fair-use doctrine, so that intermediaries like us can rely on this important doctrine with a measure of business certainty.

YouTube to McCain: You Made Your DMCA Bed, Lie in It!

Google's loss is the Electronic Frontier Foundation's gain.

The EFF, based in San Francisco, said Monday it has snapped up Michael Kwun, the Mountain View-based search engine's chief of litigation.

"I've really been a big fan of EFF," Kwun said in a brief telephone interview.

Kwun, 39, graduated from Boalt School of Law at UC Berkeley in 1998. He was the lawyer responsible for managing Google's ongoing defense against a copyright case brought by Viacom. Other intellectual property courtroom disputes concern YouTube, Google Book Search, Google AdWords and Google Image Search.

"I've always been interested in technology and its intersection with law," Kwun said. "I think that technology creates a whole wealth of issues."

Obviously, he'll be making less cash at the nonprofit, where he'll focus on intellectual property. "It's rewarding in different ways," he said.

Bang.

EFF Scores Google's Litigation Gun | Threat Level

Copyfighters in Tennessee have scored a massive win, defanging a crappy, RIAA-written state bill:

Kudos to the Tennessee crew.

Copyfighters beat down Tennessee bill - Boing Boing

[1] Meet up with us next Wednesday (March 5th) to go to Nashville and protest! (5:00 AM - March 5th) we will have a bus - we will leave at 5AM in Knoxville (meet at COPYSHOP).

Gather at 8AM (if you can get there by yourself)
on the corner of 6th and Union St in Nashville!

The primary broken thing about the rule being protested here is that it would require Universities to institute a surveillance system that watched network traffic and identified transfers of copyrighted content.

Copyright protest in Nashville March 5th - COPYFIGHT NOW!

I ran for school board where I live this past fall and created some TV commercials including this one with a 'Star Wars' theme. A few months ago VH1 grabbed the commercial from YouTube and featured it in a segment of its show 'Web Junk 2.0.' Neither VH1 or its parent company Viacom told me they were doing this or asked my permission to use it, but I didn't mind it if they did. I thought that Aries Spears's commentary about it was pretty hilarious, so I posted a clip of VH1's segment on YouTube so that I could put it on my blog. I just got an e-mail from YouTube saying that the video has been pulled because Viacom is claiming that I'm violating its copyright. Viacom used my video without permission on their commercial television show, and now says that I am infringing on their copyright for showing the clip of the work that Viacom made in violation of my own copyright!

Peel back the layers of the irony onion...

Slashdot | Viacom Says User Infringed His Own Copyright

Disney lawyers' heads must be spinning over this one. A movie posted on Stanford University's site called "A Fair(y) Use Tale" mashes up all your Disney favorites to humorously and effectively explain copyright law. The ten minute movie, directed by Eric Faden, came out of Stanford University's Fair Use Project Documentary Film Program. Stanford's Fair Use Project--to which Stanford Law professor, Copyright guru, Creative Commons advocate and Wired writer Lawrence Lessig contributes--was founded last year to "support to a range of projects designed to clarify, and extend, the boundaries of fair use in order to enhance creative freedom." And, well, the movie is damn sure creative, and certainly seems to take the boundaries of fair use about as far as they can go.

The mashup cuts up and splices audio from more Disney movies than I could begin to list (or even identify) to explain the intricacies of copyright law and the fair use doctrine. It takes the works of "the very folks we can thank for nearly endless copyright terms" and flips them to argue against longer copyrights and attacks on fair use. It leads to some beautifully surreal moments, often highly recursive, with the characters of The Jungle Book and The Lion King asking questions such as "what is the public domain?" or proclaiming "fair Use is not a right; fair use is only a legally defensible position, and this is not fair...The point is if fair use actually works then movies like this one will have legal protection." Word.

This video is damn impressive.

Hijacked Disney Characters Explain Copyright