Copyright News

On this day in 1790, the U.S. Congress enacted the fed­eral copy­right law, which at the time pro­tected works for 14 years with the chance for one renewal. The cur­rent copy­right term is now the life of the author plus 70 years.

In other news, the Associated Press announced today a new part­ner­ship with Web firm Attributor. The AP hopes the company’s ser­vices will let the 161-year-old news orga­ni­za­tion bet­ter track how their sto­ries and pho­tos are dis­sem­i­nated online and detect copy­right infringements.

Also, ear­lier this month the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed suit against Uri Geller, the famed para­nor­mal­ist on behalf of Brian Sapient, a mem­ber of a skep­tics group. Sapient uploaded a video to YouTube that ques­tions Geller’s psy­chic spoon-bending abil­ity that excerpted a por­tion of a NOVA doc­u­men­tary that fea­tured footage owned by Geller. The EFF argues that this is a clear exam­ple of fair-use; Geller alleges copy­right infringement.

And finally, an Op-Ed piece by Mark Helprin in the New York Times has raised some hack­les among copy­right thinkers. On May 20, Helprin wrote an edi­to­r­ial decry­ing lim­ited copy­rights, pre­fer­ring instead to think of intel­lec­tual prop­erty as equal to any other eco­nomic ven­ture:

No one except per­haps Hamilton or Franklin might have imag­ined that ser­vices and intel­lec­tual prop­erty would become pri­mary fields of endeavor and the chief engines of the econ­omy. Now they are, and it is no more ratio­nal to deny them equal sta­tus than it would have been to con­fis­cate farms, rope­walks and other forms of prop­erty in the 18th century.

His advice for Congress is to extend copy­rights “as far as it can throw.” Ben Vershbow at the Institute for the Future of the Book called the edi­to­r­ial “idi­otic,” and scholar Larry Lessig set up a wiki which aims at writ­ing a response to Helprin.

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5. Possible Copyright Problems in Hollywood