i find it funny... [re: amv copyright infringment]

[Pwolf]

when amvs do show up on ANN it has to be about copyright... lol

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/article.php?id=7347

Pwolf

[x_rex30]

damn!!

Interesting article. :\

[Fall_Child42]

Great... and instead of expanding on how it isn't copyright infringment, and instead art... he gave a detailed list of how we are all pirates and no good theives. GReeeat...

[Kai Stromler]

Great... and instead of expanding on how it isn't copyright infringment, and instead art... he gave a detailed list of how we are all pirates and no good theives. GReeeat...

uh, no. Lawrence Lessig is one of the leading advocates for reform of intellectual property laws, and was trying to make the point that while this is illegal (and it is, no matter where you look), it shouldn't be. The commentary on the legal status of AMVs at the end of the article was probably added by ANN, and is largely for the uninformed members of the general anime audience who somehow still think that what we do is not in violation of current copyright laws.

--K

[Fall_Child42]

No No no... you misunderstood, (probably my lazyness not wanting to type out the whole explination... )

Lawrence Lessig, I get what he is trying to do...And I whole heartedly applaud him for it. however what I was getting at was the article itself ended up portraying us as pirates in the end. it's one of the most important rules of advertising, people will always remember best the last thing they read, so if you have to put negative things in about your product do so in the middle.

for example if the last paragraph was moved to the second paragraph... it would look like the corporate heads were the badguys ... not us. as it stands now, it still seems as though in the end we are just pirates.

[ssj4lonewolf]

hey i love em for the effort but i kinda dont like where this can be taken.

[MortalGathum]

Bah this isn't something to worry about. No one would ever crack down on it. If anything specific anime titles get a good free promo set out for them just because of amvs. Even if you charged money for people to watch your amv it would never make enough money for creators to get angry at you.

But yeah I was also under the impression that the article was trying to get people to think that we're all pirates.

[Castor Troy]

This is why I changed "created by" to "edited by" on my video credits...

[TaranT]

Well, at least they didn't arrest him for showing AMVs in public. (I wonder who's vids were used?) And maybe he got some people in the audience interested in buying some anime. He might just as well have played any of the flood of videos that are using LotR, Buffy, Xena, etc.

I know Lessig publishes in Wired magazine and elsewhere, so we might hear more from him later on AMVs or vids in general.

ANN posted only an excerpt from the full article (emph. added).

Digital Media Issues Debated at EMX Confab

The annual Entertainment Media Expo (EMX) kicked off this week in Los Angeles with a keynote session debating the issue of “fair use” vs. content protection.

Lawrence Lessig, professor of law at Stanford and author of the book Free Culture, showed the EMX audience clips of “Anime Music Videos” — scenes of anime cartoons spliced together by creative fans to create funky music videos set to popular songs — as a colorful example.

Lessig called for courts and copyright holders to better define “fair use” and balance creative expression with copyright control when it comes to emerging technologies.

“My plea is that we recognize the need to dial back the mentality of control,” Lessig said. “Copyright laws have and should be used to promote the progress of a market, not protect the profits of a small and declining cartel.”

Given a chance to rebut Professor Lessig, George Borowski, an attorney with Mitchell, Silberling and Knuff, hailed the Supreme Court’s recent decision against file-sharing service Grokster.

Technology like Grokster’s peer-to-peer (P2P) file trading should not get a free pass simply because it can ostensibly be used for good, Borowski said. The facts are that it is being used for illegal copying and distribution 90 percent of the time, he said.

Lessig returned to the podium to point out that part of the rationale used in the case against Grokster — that 90 percent of P2P use is illegal — is the exact same illegal-copying percentage that Hollywood studios cited in the historic Sony Betamax case, when fighting that technology. But in the end, as in every other copyright issue in the history of the market, the technology won out and was allowed to continue, Lessig noted.

P2P fights aside, Hollywood is increasingly embracing Internet technology as a way to get the message out to fans about movies as they hit theaters and home video, according to speakers at the “Hollywood Online: DVD and the Internet” panel later in the day.

J.D. Black of Sony Pictures Digital said that some Internet marketing even swings toward Professor Lessig’s idea of copyright use.

For the first Resident Evil movie, Sony provided artwork and assets for fans to create a sales sheet in a contest, he said. The company also has dabbled in contests for fans to create key art for DVD box covers.

“We want to reach out to the fans and allow them to participate, because they’re going to anyway,” Black said.

EMX presenters and panels also offered updated data on the progress of PlayStation Portable’s (PSP) Universal Media Disc (UMD).

Bob Hurley from disc manufacturer Sony DADC said PSP’s installed base in the United States will reach 5 million units by the end of the year and increase to 30 million by 2008, citing data from Understanding & Solutions.

So far, UMD games are narrowly outselling movies and other programming, 52 percent to 48 percent, Hurley said. More than 9 million games and 8 million other UMDs have been sold to consumers, according to Sony research.

About 4 million of those games sold at the time of the hardware’s launch; since then, sales have shifted to non-game software, which account for 60 percent of sales.

The company expects that percentage to swing back toward game software as game publishers launch more PSP games in the fourth quarter.

source

[Kusoyaro]

funky music videos set to popular songs

Is that what I spend my free time making?