Digital Rights Network

Mia Garlick of CC writes:

"Following on from the recent decision in a Dutch Court, Creative Commons licenses have also been implicated in a decision in Spain. The issue in this case was not whether the CC license was enforceable, but instead whether the major collecting society in Spain could collect royalties from a bar that played CC-licensed music.

... in the Fall of 2005, the main Spanish collecting society — Sociedad General de Autores y Editores (“SGAE”) — sued Ricardo Andrés Utrera Fernández, the owner of Metropol, a disco bar located in in Badajoz alleging that he had failed to pay SGAE’s license fee of 4.816,74 € for the period from November 2002 to August 2005 for the public performance of music managed by the collecting society.

On January 23-24, 2006, Intelligent Television hosted the Economics of Open Content symposium at MIT to bring together representatives from media industries, cultural and educational institutions, and legal and business minds to discuss how to make open content happen better and faster.

They've now released the whole set of the presentations under a CC attribution license including Terry Fisher on 'The Economics of the Music Industry' and Eric von Hippel on 'New Models of Creative Production in the Digital Age'.

= Forum on Open Content =

* www: http://www.openknowledgefoundation.org/okforums/content/
* registration (optional): email okforums-info [at] okfn.org
* previous forums: http://www.openknowledgefoundation.org/okforums/

== Where and When ==

* When: Wednesday 22nd February 2006, 7-9pm
* Where: Stanhope Centre, Marble Arch, London.
* Directions: http://www.stanhopecentre.org/about/directions.shtml
* Map: http://tinyurl.com/dlrpt
* Who can attend: public. Registration is optional but useful so please notify us if you can via: okforums-info [at] okfn.org
* Who is speaking:

Deadline for Submissions: Extended to 28th of February (was: Thursday 19 January 2006)

CULTURE MEDIA AND SPORT COMMITTEE
16 November 2005 No. 11

New inquiry: New media and the creative industries
The Culture, Media and Sport Committee is announcing today a new inquiry into the challenges and opportunities for the creative industries arising from the development of new media platforms. For the purposes of the inquiry, the term "creative industries" includes music, visual broadcasts, sound broadcasts, film, graphic art, design, advertising, fashion and games software.

See previous DRN article on 2004 decision by US Sixth circuit that even a 2 second sample constituted infringement.

See http://www.low-life.fsnet.co.uk/copyright/index.htm for an excellent (though dated) overview of copyright and sampling along with many examples of litigation over sampling infringements.

Examples

One of the more famous U.S music infringement cases involved ex-Beatle George Harrison, who was found by a jury to have "unconsciously" copied the Shirelle's composition "He's So Fine" in his 1971 hit "My Sweet Lord." Although George Harrison's hit was found to be strikingly similar to the Shirelle's song, it is even possible to infringe another song if only just a few notes are "borrowed." [Source]

Free Culture UK launched last Saturday at OpenTech 2005. It brings together many of the groups who have been active in this area over the last year including Friends of the Creative Domain. I think this is a very promising way to allow different projects to collaborate as well as providing a central organization that can coordinate activities as necessary and provide a focal point for involvement.

The site is at: http://www.freeculture.org.uk/

The wiki is at: http://www.freeculture.org.uk/wiki

This morning I attended the IPPR Creative Britannia event. Mr James Purnell, recently appointed Minister for the Creative Industries, gave the keynote speech (the two other speakers were Ekow Eshun of the Institute for Contemporary Arts and Adam Singer Chief Executive of the collecting societies MCPS and PRS). The speech is now up:

http://www.culture.gov.uk/global/press_notices/archive_2005/purnell_creative_inds_speech.htm

Given recent stories in the press about term extensions it had been thought the Minister might make some announcement on this score. In fact he made *no* mention of this at all. The statements on IP were of the traditional kind: IP is important, we need to protect it, "we need an IP framework that balances the needs of consumers, creators, and businesses" (a statement that sits uneasily with the fact that the Creative Industries IP forum -- created by the DCMS last year -- is rights-holder dominated and has focused almost exclusively on piracy). Unsurprisingly there was also no mention of new, more open approaches to content production and distribution in the private or public sector.

Today I had the privilege of attending the launch event for the Creative Archive Licence Group. I admit the name is a bit of a mouthful and that's because now it isn't just the BBC, but Channel 4, the British Film Institute and the Open University as well. The glue binding these together isn't yet a formal organization of any kind but a commitment to use the BBC drafted Creative Archive licence (unfortunately in the end the BBC didn't feel able to sign on to a Creative Commons licence for a variety of reasons). Of course the licence is just a means to an end -- the real purpose of the whole endeavour is to actually start making material available.