Copyright

So Kos uses his blog, just like Michelle Malkin, to parachute on the AP controversy and call himself a hero. In the post not only does he quote an AP article (something I had done earlier that day for fisking purposes), but proceeds to dump on both Rogers Cadenhead, Bob Cox and Ron Coleman for having the temerity to talk with the AP about guidelines :

"The dumbasses at the Media Bloggers Association, of course, are walking right into that meeting because they crave nothing more than creating the impression that they, you know, represent bloggers (they don't)."

This, mind you, after the fact that Rogers had asked for those guidelines. Here's the back story :

Yesterday was intense day that I think was made worse by an article written by Scott Hansell over at The New York Times. Not only did he describe bloggers as "free wheeling", but Hansell made it look like the boycott started by netroots bloggers that spread through the blogosphere was going to be over once the Associated Press had discussions "with representatives of the Media Bloggers Association" that would produce "guidelines" to impose on bloggers.

We don’t want to cast a pall over the blogosphere by being heavy-handed, so we have to figure out a better and more positive way to do this,” Mr. Kennedy said.

Mr. Kennedy said the company was going to meet with representatives of the Media Bloggers Association, a trade group, and others. He said he hopes that these discussions can all occur this week so that guidelines can be released soon.

Still, Mr. Kennedy said that the organization has not withdrawn its request that Drudge Retort remove the seven items. And he said that he still believes that it is more appropriate for blogs to use short summaries of A.P. articles rather than direct quotations, even short ones.

“Cutting and pasting a lot of content into a blog is not what we want to see,” he said. “It is more consistent with the spirit of the Internet to link to content so people can read the whole thing in context.”

Even if The A.P. sets standards, bloggers could choose to use more content than its standards permit, and then The A.P. would have to decide whether to take legal action against them.

The last paragraph is not only the other (after the free wheeling adjective) offending point of this article. It gets picked up by none other than The Associate Press, which goes on to "report" (and here I am breaking to boycott in order to fisk them)

NEW YORK - The Associated Press, following criticism from bloggers over an AP assertion of copyright, plans to meet this week with a bloggers' group to help form guidelines under which AP news stories could be quoted online.

Jim Kennedy, the AP's director of strategic planning, said Monday that he planned to meet Thursday with Robert Cox, president of the Media Bloggers Association, as part of an effort to create standards for online use of AP stories by bloggers that would protect AP content without discouraging bloggers from legitimately quoting from it.

The meeting comes after AP sent a legal notice last week to Rogers Cadenhead, the author of a blog called the Drudge Retort, a news community site whose name is a parody of the prominent blog the Drudge Report.

The notice called for the blog to remove several postings that AP believed was an improper use of its stories. Other bloggers subsequently lambasted AP for going after a small blogger whom they thought appeared to be engaging in a legally permissible and widely practiced activity protected under "fair use" provisions of copyright law.

In response, the AP indicated it would seek to create guidelines, though even that idea triggered further protests. Michael Arrington wrote on his TechCrunch blog Monday that AP "doesn't get to make its own rules about how its content is used, if those rules are stricter than the law allows."
FULL ARTICLE AND SOURCE

It is outrageous that the AP, with the help of one of it's members (The New York Times), is spinning this Thursday as some sort of workshop that they will use, with the help of the Media Bloggers Association, to tell bloggers what is Fair Use.

And it is what I was twittering about with Jay Rosen last night. Jay and I reckoned there was what it seemed a "diffusing" element to the way the news were being report from Hansell down. He picked up on it as "the journalists' attempt to calm things down". I described as "there's an interesting diffusing dynamic going on, starting @ NYT" that had been preceded by the following twitts :

blogdiva: @jayrosen_nyu what a lot of your media peeps fail to mention is that no matter what AP says about use of their content there'll be a boycott
about 10 hours later · Reply · View Tweet

blogdiva: @jayrosen_nyu the boycott is not going to end after Ap meets the MBA because the issue here is that they don't get to say what is fair use
less than a minute later · Reply · View Tweet

It wasn't until after I spoke with Robert Cox that it hit me : Yes, indeed, people are reading these as "appeasement" quotes from AP. It does look like the article are meant to diffuse the issue and they're doing so by using Robert Cox's meeting as part of their damage control.

We will deal here with the first part of the discussion which is about Rogers' C&D, the agreement he brokered with the AP and the Thursday meeting. The second part, which is about the reorganization of the Media Bloggers Association and how to become a member will be posted separately.

Rogers Cadenhead, founder and publisher of The Drudge Retort, has been Cease and Desisted by AP News for publishing fragments of their syndicated news articles and reports.

Yes, fragments, not the whole articles. Go to Rogers' site to read the reasons given by AP.

Adding a quote to a blog post is very much like the sampling of a hook or a beat on a song. It's why so many people were opposed to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. It's not only that albums like Beck's Odelay or Public Enemy's Fear Of A Black Planet would never had happened. Documentaries, archival works, opinion or scholarly writing would be all but non-existent if it means that now journalists, bloggers, historians and scholars would need to pay publishing houses for every single quote and/or sample they need for their work.

OMG! This is a whole phenomenon. Via Librarian's Matter, I found more Code Monkeys. Here's my favorites :

• The Anime One
• Awesome Clockwork Orange version
• Those Asian dudes
• OMFG! A machinima version made with "The Movies Game", for a machinima show called TrashTalk ... Sweet!
• And another machinima version made with Sims2.

I have just wasted almost an hour of my life following my sons recent obsession. LOL!

This post wouldn't be complete if we didn't include the original code monkey. I give you, Steve Ballmer --Microsoft's Monkey Boy-- The Remix :

Ugh.

If there ever was a big media juxtapotion of capitalist imperialism and mysogyny this has got to be the one.

This particular portrait haunts me. Not because there is anything wrong with the girl, but because there is everything wrong with making her a piece of exotica.

She may elicit comparisons with the madonnas of the Renaissance; but I feel our Afghani girl was shot to look more like a pre-Raphaelite painting. Check out especially the ladies created by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

With their dreams of brotherhoods, medievalist fantasies and nymph fetish, the pre-Raphaelites artists can be considered one of the most anti-women aesthetic movements of European. I would like to make the point that it is particularly mysogynist exactly because their style was meant to represent women as precious objects.

So when I look at this ironic juxtaposition at The New York Times, I read it not just as a joke. Looking at it closely it speaks volumes about the way in which Americans not only regard women but 'foreign' or colored women.

Call it the Pier 1 Imports effect.

Anything that is not the 'mainstream' American culture or looks like is treated by the purveyors of 'haute taste' as a commodity, as another tradeable piece of furniture or accessory of interior decor.

I am a member of The Open House Project, a collaborative and bipartisan effort organized by The Sunlight Foundation to bring practices of transparency and openness to Congress through the use of digital and internet technologies.

Today we are able to declare a huge win for bloggers and citizen journalists alike. This is what Beltway Blogroll reports :

C-SPAN To Offer Free Access To Hearings
Andrew Noyes, one of my senior writers, has been covering this breaking story for Technology Daily the past couple of weeks. It started when House Republicans criticized House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. -- and then retracted that criticism -- for posting footage from House floor debates on her new blog, The Gavel.

The story sparked a movement to make more congressional video freely available, and C-SPAN quickly obliged.

Here's what two C-SPAN executives said about the change in policy:

-- Executive Committee Chairman William Bresnan, the CEO of Bresnan Communications: "The C-SPAN board sees this as helping us carry out C-SPAN's public service mission. The cable industry created this network to allow citizens greater access to their government, and this enhancement appropriately reflects the rapid changes in the online information world."

-- President and co-chief operating officer Rob Kennedy: "Giving voice to the average citizen has been a centerpiece of C-SPAN's journalism since our network's founding in 1979. As technology advances, we want to continue to be a leader in providing citizens with the tools to be active participants in the democratic process.

This is huge.

Government cameras film all Congressional proceedings. The footage though, is broadcast mostly through C-SPAN. It is not clear to me if C-SPAN is a 501c(3) --even though their tag line is "created by the cable companies, offered as a public service" nowhere in their site does it say they are a not-for-profit.

If they are indeed a non-profit, they have been quite bullish about the "copyright" they hold on the public domain footage they broadcast. Basically they've made it impossible to use congressional video footage by having a few seconds of original content a the beginning of all congressional videos, slapping their logo on it and claiming, then it's their original content.

As much as I would like to take at face value the comments made by the higher ups at C-SPAN, this admission of fair use shows they are scared of losing what made them precious : their role of gatekeepers.

From the brilliant people of Gizmodo :
Putting Our Money Where Our Mouths Are: Boycott the RIAA in March - Gizmodo:

Alright, we've been following the RIAA's increasingly frequent affronts to privacy and free speech lately, and it's about time we stopped merely bitching and moaning and did something about it. The RIAA has the power to shift public policy and to alter the direction of technology and the Internet for one reason and one reason alone: it's totally loaded. Without their millions of dollars to throw at lawyers, the RIAA is toothless. They get their money from us, the consumers, and if we don't like the way they're behaving, we can let them know with our wallets.

With that in mind, Gizmodo is declaring the month of March Boycott the RIAA month. We want to get the word out to as many people as humanly possible that we can all send a message by refusing to buy any album put out by an RIAA label. Am I saying you should start pirating music? Not at all. You can continue to support the artists you enjoy and respect in a number of ways.

The campaign is simple. Basically boycott anything put out by Warner Music (US), EMI (Britain), Vivendi Universal (France) and Sony BMG (Japan and Germany), the companies that fund the RIAA and their ridiculous campaigns.

This is what I got late last night :

From: margaret_langston@timeinc.com
Date: 28 February 2007 06:57:58 PM EST
To: Liza Sabater ...

Subject: Re: DMCA Copyright Notice

Dear Website Proprietor:
I am an attorney for Time Inc., the corporate publisher of People Magazine. This will put you on notice that Time Inc. has concluded an agreement with a photo agency for exclusive rights to publish photographs of Patrick Dempsey and his family (including his newborn twins) in People Magazine and on People.com. These are the only photographs of Mr. Dempsey and his twins now in existence.

In the past your website has posted photographs which have been licensed exclusively to Time Inc. for publication in People Magazine and on People.com, in violation of Time Inc.’s exclusive rights.
This letter is an official notification under the provisions of Section 512(c) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that the posting of any photographs of Patrick Dempsey and/or any other members of his family with his newborn twins, would infringe Time Inc.’s rights in North America, Australia and New Zealand.

I have a good faith belief that use of such photographs in the manner set forth herein would not be authorized by of Time Inc., its licensing representatives, or the law. The information provided herein is accurate to the best of my knowledge. I hereby swear under penalty of perjury that I am authorized to act on behalf of Time Inc. for matters pertaining to notification of infringement of its exclusive rights in its copyrighted material.

Very truly yours

Nicholas J. Jollymore
Deputy General Counsel
Time Inc.
nicholas_jollymore@timeinc.com

Here is my response:

I haven't done any business blogging in a long while. Well, I have a reason now : The idiots of Splash News and 6 other agencies are happy slapping themselves on the back for threatening Perez Hilton with a lawsuit for photographs they claim he "stole" from their website.

Perez Hilton is to be hit by a multi-million dollar federal lawsuit from the top seven paparazzi agencies in the US.

Splash News, INF, Ramey, Bauer Griffin, WENN, Most Wanted and Flynet have joined forces to stop Perezhilton.com from using copyrighted images.
"Perez claims he is making a fortune off exploiting pictures taken by photographers. He blatantly violates copyright and makes advertising revenue off other people's works," said Gary Morgan of Splash News.

[...]

The seven agencies have spent the last few weeks conferring over how to stop Hilton. In an unprecedented co-operation between paparazzi and showbusiness agencies, the heads of the agencies agreed to take action.
A letter was sent demanding full payment of all infringed material or face a lawsuit next week.

I honestly do not understand why people in the gossip business hate Perez Hilton (aka Mario Lavandeira) so much. I don't know if it's because he is :

1. A successful blogger
2. A successful gay blogger
3. A successful gay latino blogger

Even if professional gossip bloggers like Mario wanted to register with the Splash News site and check the prices on their photos (which are not posted publicly, by the way), this is what they are hit with: