Good News/Bad News In Brazil: Effort To Legalize Mashups... But Google Liable For User Actions

from the ah,-brazil dept

These two submissions came in one after the other, both having to do with Brazil, so I decided to just mix them together into a single post. Of course, it's a bit of a good news/bad news sorta thing. Let's start with the "bad news." Reader Stuart Waterman alerts us to the news that Google, owner of Orkut (the social network that is amazingly popular in Brazil for reasons still unclear) has been ordered to pay Formula 1 racer Rubens Barrichello $500,000 because there were fake profiles of him on Orkut. If this were the US, the case would have been tossed out on Section 230 grounds (noting that the service provider is not liable for the actions of users -- even though the users may be liable). But the Brazilian court apparently said that Google is, in fact, liable because it manages the site. If you're a service provider in Brazil, you just got a reason to lock down any sort of user-generated offering. Of course, this has happened before to some extent. Remember that a Brazilian court once tried to get YouTube shut down entirely due to an uploaded video that someone didn't like.

On to the good news. Carl alerts us to the news that Brazil is considering a new copyright law that would legalize mashups and private copies. It would also allow the reproduction of out of print works. Of course, this is just the proposed bill, and you can expect that the entertainment industry is about to send in the lobbyist army to fix things up quickly. On the whole, though, Brazil has been quite good about recognizing the downsides to overaggressive copyright law. In fact, Gilberto Gil, a grammy-award winning musician and Brazil's former minister of culture, released his music under a Creative Commons license, and has regularly spoken out against abuses of intellectual property law. And, of course, we've seen stories about how forms of Brazilian music have thrived by taking advantage of the easy promotion and distribution allowed by file sharing. It would be nice if the country's laws were updated to reflect that.

Now, if only they could also change the laws to stop blaming service providers for the actions of users, then Brazil would get it all right this time.

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Instrumentube: Play Instruments On YouTube

from the creative-uses dept

We're still totally amazed at the Thru You album that Kutiman came up with earlier this year by mixing together a bunch of totally separate YouTube videos into a rather complete album of amazingly good songs that had never been heard before. Kutiman had to do lots of work to find the right videos playing the right music for what he wanted, but the next person looking to do something similar have a bit of help. Daniel alerts us to a new project that he's created on YouTube, called Instrumentube, which is basically a series of simple videos of a single instrument being played in a specific way, matching up with a chart on the bottom, which perfectly aligns with the YouTube slider. Once you let the full videos load, you can just start clicking on the slider in the appropriate place to get the note you want. I was going to embed a few below, but for some reason I'm having trouble getting the embeds to be at the right size so that the notes line up with where the slider is, so if you want to check out a few individually, here's a piano, electric guitar, standup bass and shaker.

Of course, by themselves they might not be anything special, but start mixing them together... and maybe with some work (and some others) you can start to get something like this:

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Who Says Remixing Isn't Creative Or New?

from the or-copyright-infringement... dept

There's been a bunch of buzz this week about a new "album" created by an Israeli musician, Kutiman, who took videos on YouTube of people playing different instruments, and mixed them together to create a series of songs (tragically, it looks like all the attention has brought down the site right now). The end result is incredible. The music is really good, even if it's based off of a mix of high and low quality clips that no one ever would have put together otherwise. Whenever we talk about the power of "mashups" or "remixed" content, there's always someone who complains that it doesn't count, and it's not really creative or new because the remixer "didn't create anything." However, I don't see how anyone can listen to the songs created here and say that Kutiman didn't create something new and amazing. But, of course, as reader Johnjac notes, in theory, those whose videos were used on this album certainly could claim copyright infringement (in the credits, you can see all the "original" videos), and perhaps they might. But it's difficult to take seriously any copyright law that says that creating music in this manner is illegal.

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UK Police Worried About Online Crime Maps

from the so-go-where-the-crime-isn't? dept

One of the first sites that kicked off the whole "map mashup" craze was Adrian Holovaty's ChicagoCrime, which showed the locations of crimes in Chicago placed on a Google map. The site has since been integrated into Holovaty's startup, EveryBlock. However, the idea of an online crime map is certainly now considered quite a useful concept. Unless, you're the police, apparently. Over in the UK, police are complaining about a proposed online crime map, saying that it will help criminals figure out how to go where the police aren't. Indeed, we've already seen that various police departments use data mining tools to try to predict where new crimes will occur, but it seems a bit overblown to suggest that an online crime map would really be such a problem.

First of all, it assumes that criminals are smart enough to plan out their crimes by going online and seeking out low crime areas ahead of time. While that may be true of a few, it seems unlikely that your average criminal is going to do that. Second, there's usually a reason why crimes cluster in certain areas, and it's not like criminals are suddenly going to run to a new neighborhood because an online map shows there's plenty of (or little) crime there. It seems likely that most criminals in high crime areas already know that it's a high crime area. And, if all these criminals suddenly run to low crime areas, then the police should be able to adjust, right? Worst case, they just send more patrols to the low crime areas, since according to their own logic, that's where the criminals will head. And that, of course, shows the fallacy of the police officers' worries. They know that criminals won't rush to low crime areas, or there wouldn't even be an issue here.

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The Napster Of Newspapers

from the cut-and-paste dept

It's no secret that I tend to think folks who worry about plagiarism quite often blow the issue out of proportion. Luckily, over the last few years, we've seen more and more folks start to recognize that plagiarism isn't always so bad. In fact, quite often, the plagiarists do something more interesting with your content, sometimes taking plagiarism to a new level of artform. The more you look at it, there's a pretty fine line between plagiarism and inspiration. Also, in other contexts, "plagiarism" is quite similar to everyday collaboration. Yes, the failure to properly credit the original author is a bit sleazy, but if you can get beyond that issue, plagiarism is an interesting phenomenon to observe.

Over at Slate, writer Jody Rosen is discussing what he believes may be one of the "biggest" cases of plagiarism ever discovered: an entire Texas-based free alternative weekly newspaper that appears to have an awful lot of plagiarized content. Rosen only discovered it when someone pointed out to him that one of his own columns appeared (in part) in the newspaper, The Bulletin. As he looked into it, he realized that the article actually mashed up three separate articles written by others, making very minor changes and not even doing much to hide the very different writing styles.

The more he looked, the more plagiarism he found. He eventually got his hands on the latest paper issue of the newspaper, and worked out that every single article, other than some short blurbs about local events, appeared to be plagiarized in this manner. Even the letters to the editor were plagiarized from elsewhere. And while he does sound a little bit ticked off at having his work used in this way, he seems more amused by the whole thing. And while the following paragraph is almost certainly meant sarcastically, there's a point to it:

But perhaps the Bulletin is merely on-trend--or even ahead of its time. The Drudge Report, the Huffington Post, and Real Clear Politics have made names and money by sifting through RSS feeds; Tina Brown and Barry Diller are preparing the launch of their own news aggregator. Mike Ladyman and company may simply be bringing guerilla-style 21st-century content aggregation to 20th-century print media: publishing the Napster of newspapers.

Or there may be a better description: it's the mashup or mixtape of newspapers. Most of the plagiarized articles (all of which have been taken off the web since Slate published Rosen's article) involve bits and pieces from other articles, trying to craft (weakly, from the sound of it), a new article of sorts. And yes, it's sleazy for the (tiny) Bulletin staff to have pretended to write these articles themselves, but is it all that different than what Girl Talk does with music -- which people celebrate (though, to be fair, Girl Talk's mashups are actually good, which makes a difference).

Either way, this is not to condone what The Bulletin has done. It's definitely underhanded and scammy -- and, hopefully thanks to this expose, the folks behind the paper find their reputation deservedly knocked down a few pegs. But, from a cultural standpoint, it's quite interesting. Matt Mason posits that such mashups are often a sign of an unmet market need in his book The Pirate's Dilemma. He points to many similar "mashups" in other fields that later resulted in legitimate enterprises. So, perhaps all this really tells us is that there's a market for taking good content from all over the place, and "mashing" it all up together in a useful manner -- which is exactly what some aggregator sites already do.

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UK Gov't Throws Open Data For Mashups; Offers Prize Money For Best Results

from the about-time dept

We were just complaining about the fact that governments should be exposing APIs on certain government data so that people can create more useful services out of them -- and it appears that someone in the UK was having similar thoughts. The government is now opening up a bunch of data to whoever wants to play with it. Not only is the gov't encouraging people to make mash-ups with the data, it's actually offering cash prizes to those who come up with the best results. Nice to see a government doing something smart.

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Universal Music Working Hard To Alienate Its Biggest Stars

from the no-mashups-allowed dept

The recording industry loves to trot out musicians in its fight for ever-more-draconian copyright laws. We're repeatedly told that fans who create mash-ups with their favorite songs and post them back to YouTube are not only infringing copyright, but are hurting the very artists who created that music in the first place. The funny thing is, a lot of musicians don't seem to have gotten the memo. A couple of years ago, OK Go front man Damian Kulash took to the pages of the New York Times to tell of his battle to keep DRM off of his band's latest CD, which he knew would turn off a lot of fans. Now Nine Inch Nails founder Trent Reznor, who just a few weeks ago parted ways with Universal, has a statement on the group's website about his own struggles with his former label. Reznor has actually encouraged fans to share and re-mix his music, and has even released a new CD featuring user-created mash-ups of Nine Inch Nails music.

He was planning to create a YouTube-style website to host and promote the best mash-ups, but he found out at the last moment that Universal wasn't willing to participate in the site, for fear it would undermine their legal arguments against YouTube and its competitors. It's a little bit unclear about what the exact controversy is about. To its credit, Universal apparently hasn't tried to stop Reznor from setting up his own mash-up site. Since Reznor has been released from his Universal contract, it's not surprising that Universal would be reluctant to help him promote his music -- even though it still owns the rights to his earlier songs. So in some sense, it seems a little unfair to blame Universal for not wanting to be involved in setting up a website to promote the music of one of its former acts. But this kind of friction also makes it pretty clear that the labels' claims to represent the interests of artists are rather hollow. Reznor wants to experiment with new ways of promoting his music, while Universal seems to be myopically focused on the next quarter's CD revenues. Instead of looking for ways to turn YouTube into a new promotional vehicle or revenue stream, they've been busy threatening to sue YouTube and its competitors. That's probably not a good strategy for Universal; it certainly isn't a good strategy for Reznor or musicians who are still on Universal's labels. Reznor, it seems, was smart to get out when he did, and I'm sure he's encouraging his musician friends to follow his lead.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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