Larry Lessig. Source: Robert Scoble on Flickr. License: CC-BY 2.0.

Techdirt reports that Larry Lessig has been sent a DMCA takedown notice for one of his presentations on YouTube by Warner Music.

Lessig has announced that Warner Music issued a DMCA takedown on one of Lessig’s own presentations, in which his use is almost certainly fair use. Lessig, of course, is a lawyer, and a big supporter of fair use, so it’s no surprise that he’s also said he’s going to be fighting this.

The thing that I can’t understand is who at Warner Music would decide this was a good idea? We’ve seen Warner make a number of highly questionable moves over the past six months, but this may be the most incomprehensible. Warner Music may claim it was an accident or that it didn’t mean to send the takedown, but that’s hard to fathom as well. The DMCA rules are pretty clear, that the filer needs to clearly own the content, and previously lawsuits have said they need to take fair use into account. I’m guessing we haven’t heard the end of this yet…

Can we say “epic fail”?

• Techdirt
• Official announcement on Twitter
• Slashdot

LA County Courthouse. Credit: "courthouse wide angle" by maveric2003 on Flickr (CC-BY)

US Federal Prosecutors are seeking a 6-month prison term for Kevin Cogill, the owner of a music website who pleaded guilty to uploading pre-release tracks of the Guns N’ Roses album Chinese Democracy:

The sentence being sought — including the calculation of damages based on the illegal activity of as many as 1,310 websites that disseminated the music after Cogill released it — underscores how serious the government is about punishing those for uploading pre-release material.

[...]

The government claimed the amount of infringement equaled $371,622. The higher the number the larger the potential prison term. The government said it produced a “reasonable estimate” and gave the defendant the “benefit of the doubt” in its calculations, which were based on each infringement being worth 99 cents on iTunes.

The Recording Industry Association of America, however, told the judge overseeing the case that the defendant’s conduct resulted in more than a $2.2 million loss based on a “$6.39 legitimate wholesale value” for the nine tracks the RIAA claims (.pdf) were downloaded about 350,000 times.

Regardless of the phantom figures, the numbers floated by the government and the RIAA assume that the music would have been purchased had it not been downloaded for free.

This illustrates the problem with the concept of “intellectual property theft”; they have no real way to determine what the value of what was “stolen”, and so they are forced to make assumptions, like everyone would have bought an album if they wanted the one song, or that people all shop at iTunes.  Putting people in prison based on these half-fantasy models don’t make much sense either.

• Wired article

Torrentfreak reports that Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, infamous for his crusade against Napster in 2000, has downloaded his band’s own album illegally.

“I sat there myself and downloaded ‘Death Magnetic’ from the Internet just to try it,” he said. “I was like, ‘Wow, this is how it works.’ I figured if there is anybody that has a right to download ‘Death Magnetic’ for free, it’s me.”

Ulrich went on to say that he and half a dozen friends were enjoying a bottle of wine at his house and used a file-sharing client (the name of which eluded him) to download the album.

“We found it – this was like two or three days after it leaked. I was like, ‘You know what? I’ve gotta try this.’ So we sat there and thirty minutes later I had ‘Death Magnetic’ in my computer. It was kind of bizarre.”

I’m hoping that this means that he will see things in an entirely different light from now on. Earlier in the article he was quoted as not being near as upset as his label when the album leaked, and I remember reading earlier about possible plans to try a Radiohead-style release in the future, so hopefully we can see some change of heart soon. Still, I’m surprised that he had never tried the technology until now.

• Torrentfreak
• Slashdot

Lawrence Lessig - Credit: scobleizer on Flickr (CC BY)

Lawrence Lessig has been appointed to the faculty of Harvard Law School.

As faculty director of the Center, Lessig will expand on the center’s work to encourage teaching and research about ethical issues in public and professional life. He will also launch a major five-year project examining what happens when public institutions depend on money from sources that may be affected by the work of those institutions — for example, medical research programs that receive funding from pharmaceutical companies whose drugs they review, or academics whose policy analyses are underwritten by special interest groups.

“I am very excited to be returning to Harvard to work on a project of enormous importance to our democracy,” said Lessig. “The chance to extend the work of the Center to focus on the problems of institutional independence is timely and essential. I am eager to work with friends and old colleagues from the Law School and across the University to make this project a success.”

Good luck to him.

• Freedom for IP

Boing Boing editor Cory Doctorow has written an article for the November 2008 issue of Locus Magazine discussing his view on the current state of copyright law.

[C]opyright’s problem is that most of the copyists cheerfully admit that they copy. The majority of American Internet users engage in infringing file-sharing. If file-sharing were stamped out tomorrow, they’d swap the same files — and more — by trading hard drives, or thumb drives, or memory cards (and more data would change hands, albeit more slowly).

Copyists either know that they infringe but don’t care, or they believe that the law can’t possible criminalize what they’re doing and assume that it punishes more egregious forms of copying, such as selling pirate DVDs in the street. In fact, copyright law penalizes selling DVDs at a much lower level than sharing the same movies over the Internet for free, and the risk of buying one of these DVDs is much lower (thanks to the high costs of enforcement against people making transactions in the real world) than the risk of downloading them online.

An interesting article, although a bit on the long side.

• Locus Online
• Slashdot

Girl Talk has been featured in the New York Times. The title of the article is “Steal This Hook? D.J. Skirts Copyright Law.”

The D.J. Girl Talk has won positive reviews for his new album and news media attention for its Radiohead-style pay-what-you-want pricing, and on Friday night he is scheduled to play a high-profile gig at the All Points West festival in Jersey City. Not bad for an artist whose music may be illegal.

Girl Talk, whose real name is Gregg Gillis, makes danceable musical collages out of short clips from other people’s songs; there are more than 300 samples on “Feed the Animals,” the album he released online at illegalart.net in June. He doesn’t get the permission of the composers to use these samples, as United States copyright law mostly requires, because he maintains that the brief snippets he works with are covered by copyright law’s “fair use” principle (and perhaps because doing so would be prohibitively expensive).

I’m guessing that this exposure is going to be bringing him lawsuits. I’m all for fair use, but as vague of a clause as it is, I’m not sure his chances would be that great against an army of expensive lawyers.

• NY Times

Ted Stevens (the senator famous for opposing net neutrality because the internet is like a bunch of “tubes”) has been charged with a series of felonies for taking bribes.

Sen. Ted Stevens, the Alaskan powerhouse Republican senator, was indicted Tuesday on seven counts of not disclosing hundreds of thousands of dollars in renovation work done on his home by a private oil services company.

The alleged free work on his Alaskan vacation home included plumbing.

It’s not clear yet if Stevens’ defense will be that the alleged gifts weren’t a big bribe, they were just a series of tubes.

Welcome to another episode of Free Culture Tabloid.

• Wired

Hans Reiser, creator of ReiserFS, has lead police to his wife, Nina’s, body.

“She was buried in a quasi-shallow grave, about four feet,” said defense attorney Richard Tamor. “She was in head-first and her feet sideways.”

Tamor said it was not far from the road. “You could see and hear traffic where it was,” he said.

According to Tamor, dozens of armed officers followed Reiser and co-counsel William DuBois — who was handcuffed to Reiser — down a steep hillside before Reiser pointed out the spot where the body was concealed.

“He passed it, and as he passed it, Bill said, ‘Does any of this look familiar? Look at this flat spot right here. Does that look familiar at all?,’” Tamor said. “He said, ‘Yeah, we passed it. Its up there.’ He pointed it out, they started digging. They found a bag and they started exhuming.”

Tamor said authorities discovered the decomposing body in one piece and said it was in what he described as a “duffel bag.”

…Before authorities brought him back to a nearby jail, they gave Reiser, who was wearing his red jail jumpsuit, a few moments “to reflect a little, to meditate near the body.

I guess he was guilty.

• Wired
• Slashdot

For a reduced sentence, Reiser has offered to reveal Nina’s (his missing wife’s) location.

Hans Reiser, the Linux programmer facing a mandatory 25-to life term for killing his wife, might disclose the location of Nina Reiser’s body in exchange for a reduced term, Alameda County District Attorney Thomas Orloff told Threat Level on Friday.

“There’s been some overtures,” he said. “But everything is in its preliminary stage.”

Another source familiar with the proposal, speaking on condition of anonymity because no deal has been struck, said Reiser, the prosecution and Alameda County Superior Court Judge Larry Goodman would have to sign off on the proposed deal. Under the plan, Reiser’s cooperation could reduce his April conviction from first-degree murder to second degree. A second-degree conviction in California carries a mandatory 15-to-life sentence.

Am I weird for still thinking he’s innocent?

• Wired
• Slashdot