Ciiju – model of the future?

Tags

ciiju, Copyright, music, network, sharing

While reading some articles online at SZ – Süddeutschezeitung (a very big German newspaper) and its youth page: Jetzt.de, I stumbled over this very interesting interview. It is in German, of course, but I will talk about the most essential parts in this blog post.

Firstly: I learned something about German Copyright law, it is allowed to make a copy of a CD for your friend.(paragraph 53 of German copyright law) But in juridical literature and in jurisdiction this copying for friends is limited to a number of 7! (Better than nothing, I’d say.)

Secondly: Some guys in Germany now use exactly this right to run a file sharing network for music. They call their service ciiju and it works like this: you sign up for the network, upload music into your profile and then have a look at your friends profile and which kind of music they have. You can put the music from your friends you like into your profile and download it to your computer, for free. Each song can be copied only 7 times and you can only upload music that you purchased legally. The site also contains a blog announcing news about ciiju and its development to keep users up to date.

I think that this concept is very interesting, as it is legal, at least within Germany (that’s probably why it is only in German…) and it offers an alternative to pirate pages and also of course to pages where you have to pay to get the song. In the interview, the interviewee says that this platform should not be considered a bad thing by the music companies, as he argues that many people don’t want to pay to download a song anyway. But through this alternative they actually might value the legal purchase again more, because when buying a song, they can put it on ciiju and then receive another song for it. So while actually only buying one, they can get two songs from it. Lawrence Lessig would probably argue that this file sharing network has a lot of  restrictions e.g. your songs can only be copied 7 times as he does in his book referring to e-books you can only read twice, but the thing is, that this concept has to have restrictions in order not to get into trouble because of piracy. And in most other cases restrictions are placed upon the consumer to protect the copyright of the author to a higher extend… So this seems to be a very interesting project and I really would like to know what you think about it. Do you think that this file sharing network has a future? That people will see the advantages from participating in it, instead of the disadvantages? Do you think that the music companies still might try to shut the page down? Do you think that this could become a model of the future, which could lead to similar pages being made in different countries according to their copyright law?

appendix to reflection post nr. 6

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Copyright, Lawrence Lessig

I’ve been thinking about the Lessig book again and there is something I kind of stumbled over when I listened to my ipod. It is the fact, that copyright law uses the word “copy” which means reproducing the original. When the law was made, there weren’t any problems with that, because most people didn’t have the possibility to copy things, so that the law didn’t regulate everyday people, but rather professionals. But with the increasing of technology it became much easier to produce a copy. Lessig gives this example: “When you “read” an electronic book, the machine is copying the text of the book from your hard drive, or from a hard drive on a network, to the memory of the computer. […] When you play a CD on your computer, the recording gets copied into memory on its way to your headphones or speakers. No matter what you do, your actions trigger the law of copyright.” (p. 98-99) Whereas “in the physical world, copyright law gives the copyright owner of a book no legal control over how many times you read a book. That is because when you read a book in real space, that “reading” does not produce a copy.” (p. 99) This historical shift in the law now regulates ordinary citizens like you and me.

I’ve been thinking about that and am wondering now whether listening to music on my ipod is actually triggering copyright law. From what Lessig said: yes and that feels kind of weird, because it’s not as if I copied the music on purpose, the copy is made without me really realising it. So if I buy a CD from the store, import it to my computer and from my computer to my ipod, I produce two copies, so that I’ve already broken copyright law twice! And even if I have bought the CD legally and purchased the right to listen to that music! I could always claim it to be “fair use”, but still, as “fair use” is not an actual law, this still remains tricky.

And what about parties? What if someone brings his ipod along to a private party, playing music over the speaker to everybody? That would certainly be against copyright law as well. But who is to blame or let’s better say who is triggering copyright law in this case? The person the ipod belongs to? Everybody who listens to the music? The person who owns the speakers over which the music is played loudly to everybody? This kind of makes criminals out of us all, without us actually being aware of it.

reflection post nr. 6

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Copyright, Lawrence Lessig, reflection post, Remix, research

Lawrence Lessig: Remix – Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy (2008) p.1-105

Lawrence Lessig is a professor for law at Stanford law school. He is not against copyright, but sees certain disadvantages in the law towards what he calls RW. He uses the term RW (read – write) to clarify his idea about Remix culture. In this culture you read/listen/watch something and are able to respond to it, by remixing it for example (there are other ways of responding, e.g. in a blog there is the possibility to leave a comment to a blog entry). The contrary to RW is RO (read – only), in which the audience is expected to only consume the art. Lessig thinks both those cultural forms necessary, but sees RW culture oppressed by the current law. In his book he argues why RW culture is so important for us. His two main reasons are: communication and education. Through remixing readymade material one can communicate a new point, because “their meaning comes not from the content of what they say; it comes from the references, which is expressible only if it is the original that gets used.” (p.74)

Something I found very interesting while reading his book is the difference he points out between written work and none written work. Nobody thinks of asking permission for quoting written work (I don’t send Mr. Lessig an email, asking whether I can use quotes from his book for my reading reflection), but when it comes to quoting something none written: “[…] the norms governing them today are very different.” (p. 53). Lessig sees one reason in the fact that writing is something that is taught to everyone, while filmmaking or record making used to be the domain of professionals and has only become more and more popular with amateurs, as the techniques to do so were developed, became better with time and became also better accessible. But Lessig thinks that quoting in none written work should be allowed as well, as it offers a wide range of creativity. He talks about some examples to emphasise this point, one is from the artist Johan Söderberg: “As Johan Söderberg says, “To me, it is just like cooking. In your cupboard in your kitchen you have lots of different things and you try to connect different tastes together to create something interesting.” The remix artist does the same thing with bits of culture found in his digital cupboard.” (p. 71) And I totally agree with Lawrence Lessig in that point. Remixing has become such a big part of our culture and offers the possibility to parody/critique/analyse the original source, to communicate a certain point of view, to make people think, that it would be a great loss, if laws continued to forbid and oppress it.

copyright class

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Copyright, Eric Faden, fair use, international copyright, mock trial, Remix

During todays class we talked about Copyright, which is a big issue for Remix. A very interesting question our teacher Jill raised in her blog before class, is the problem of our internationality. What is for example with me? I’m from Germany, living at the moment in Norway, where I make a little video about my research topic, post it on a US- homepage and than will go back to Germany again. Which copyright law do I have to stick to? I have never really thought about that question before, but now it strikes me as quite interesting. And at the moment I have no idea how to answer that question. Neither did anybody else in our class. I don’t even really know much about German copyright. I only know you can be sent to prison for five years if you download movies illegally and sell them again. But that’s pretty much all I know. I don’t know whether there is something like fair use, something that exists in US copyright law or what kind of restrictions there are.

Most of the time of our course was spent preparing and then actually going through a mock trial. To the background of our mock trial: In the USA children get taught about copyright in school. There is this video from Eric Faden (a university professor) which explains fair use by putting together all those little parts from Disney movies. The actual video is over 10 minutes long, but the longest sequence is not longer than about 10 seconds. We pretended that Disney (Disney is actually really aggressive about copyright…) saw copyright violated and wanted Mr. Faden sued for it. Each of us got a slip of paper on which was our role, I was Mr. Faden himself, so I had to defend myself in order not to go to prison or having to pay heaps of money to Disney. After everybody had gotten a role, each side sat together to talk about how they would defend their side of the case and try to win the case. After that the actual trial was held. There were heaps of good arguments and at times I actually felt a bit intimidated by Disney and their representatives, but me and my group kind of managed to get our heads out of the slip, as I was sentenced: Not Guilty! After that we only had a few minutes to talk about what we really think about that video. I think that the general opinion is, that this video is not violating copyright.

copyright

Tags

Copyright, Remix, Schwäbisch, YouTube

I searched the internet again today, mostly youtube for some interesting Remix examples and I’ve come across a very interesting case. Unfortunately the video is in German, so it’s not that much use of linking it into my blog. The situation is as follows: There is this guy who uses little sequences from the series 24 and makes a voice over for them, which he then publishes on youtube. The voice over is done in Schwäbisch which is a German dialect, from South-West-Germany. The topics the people now talk about are very trivial and that makes the whole thing very funny. The videos are very popular being watched many times. But the makers from 24 found out about it and deleted all the videos as they saw the copyright violated. The remixer didn’t care about it and uploaded them again. The case became so popular that even the TV made a little broadcast about that issue. During the TV report they interviewed a professor, specialised in computer sciences from a German university and he says, that even though it’s a difficult case, he doesn’t feel that copyright is violated in the voice over. In the contrary he sees it as kind of promotion for the series, as many people watch it and may get curious about the original content. I thought that remark quite interesting. He also adds that he doesn’t see copyright violated as something new is created.

What do you think about this whole issue? Do you think the copyright has been violated or do you think that creativity is allowed to use such sources?