copyright notices – Techdirt (original) (raw)

from the lulz dept

Were you to hear from the lobbying groups for the major book publishers on the topic of copyright, their answers are generally to push for longer terms, stricter anti-piracy measures, and the most draconian reading of copyright law possible. Groups like The Authors Guild have been firm in their stances that copyright is the only thing that keeps authors in any kind of business, so important is it to their livelihoods. One would think, therefore, that all authors of books would likewise take copyright very, very seriously.

Fortunately, for those of us that appreciate irreverent humor, not so much.

When my first couple novels came out, I lobbied to add some kind of notation about “fair use” and “limitations and exceptions to copyright” on the copyright notice page and was told not even to try because legal would never allow even the slightest variance from the boilerplate; apparently Steve Stack is better connected than I am, because his book 21st Century Dodos, has a copyright notice that is full of whimsy and gags, as Rebecca discovered and documented.

The entire thread is a fun read, and we’ll get to other authors that do this sort of thing in a moment, but the whole thing kicks off with Stack’s copyright notice on one of his books.

In case you can’t read that or click through to the tweet, the bottom photos are of Stack’s copyright notices. They are mostly boilerplate, save for these fun exceptions:

Steve Stack asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work, and woe betide anyone who suggests otherwise

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library, whatever that means

The other image is more of the same, except too long for me to type out entirely. That said, to get an idea of its flavor, it includes lines such as “No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, cookie jar or spare room… Unless you want to write the whole thing out in green crayon, in which case feel free.” and “This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, carried across the country by relay, fired into space, turned upside down, eaten… On pain of death.”

You get the idea. That idea being that it doesn’t seem like the author is taking copyright all that seriously. And he’s not alone, as it turns out. Down the thread, another tweet points out that author Dave Eggers has a habit for this sort of thing as well.

Again, read the whole thing, but the opening paragraph is tasty enough that I will quote it below in case you cannot see it.

First published 2000 by Simon & Schuster, New York, a division of a larger and more powerful company called Viacom Inc., which is wealthier and more populous than eighteen of the fifty states of America, all of Central America, and all of the former Soviet Republic combined and tripled. That said, no matter how big such companies are, and how many things they own, or how much money they have or make or control, their influence over the daily lives and hearts of individuals, and thus, like ninety-nine percent of what is done by official people in cities like Washington, or Moscow, of Sao Paulo or Auckland, their effect on the short, fraught lives of human beings who limp around and sleep and dream of flying through bloodstreams, who love the smell of rubber cement and think of space travel while having intercourse, is very very small, and so hardly worth worrying about.

Copyright © David (Dave) Eggers 2000

Height: 5’11”; Weight: 170; Eyes: blue; Hair: Brown; Hands: chubbier than one would expect; Allergies: only to dander; Place on sexual-orientation scale, with one being perfectly straight, and 10 being perfectly gay: 3

It goes on from there.

Now, none of this is to suggest that these authors have any dislike of copyright law. In fact, I scoured the internet for comments either might have made on the subject of copyright and couldn’t find a thing. Which sort of leaves the literary graffiti both left in their books’ copyright notices as their only comment on the topic at all.

And, while it cannot be said that this defacing of their own rights is dismissive of those rights entirely, it certainly does suggest both that these authors don’t take the subject quite as seriously as groups like The Authors Guild and that they have a fantastic sense of humor.

Filed Under: copyright, copyright notices, cory doctorow, dave eggers, jokes

from the or-is-it-just-weird-(c)-notices dept

You might recall that we got into a bit of… a “dispute” with Caters News Agency a few weeks back, after we noticed some monkey self-portraits in UK papers with a big “copyright” notice — despite the fact that the images were almost certainly in the public domain.

However, I’m beginning to wonder if some UK papers just stamp a totally bogus copyright notice on batches of images. That’s because ken points us to another article at the Daily Mail (where we also saw the monkey photos) and worries that it looks like the Associated Press is claiming copyright on images taken from the International Space Station, over which it holds no copyright:

Now, I’m hardly one to shy away from knocking the AP for questionable behavior, but I do wonder if the AP really is claiming copyright on this image, or if it’s just that the Daily Mail doesn’t understand copyright. That’s because above the image stamped with © AP are two images stamped with © YouTube. Here’s one:

And yet… the article even admits (directly) that these images came from Videographer Noe Castillo, who uploaded the clips to YouTube. But, of course, that doesn’t mean YouTube gets the copyright. In fact, I’m beginning to wonder if the photo editors at the Daily Mail are just clueless, and think that a copyright symbol like that is the way you acknowledge where you found something. That’s the only explanation I can come up with for the images tagged © YouTube. So let’s give the AP the benefit of the doubt (for the moment, at least), and assume that it wasn’t claiming copyright over an image for which it doesn’t hold the rights, but rather that the Daily Mail is a bit excessive in putting copyright notices on things where they don’t belong.

Filed Under: copyright, copyright notices, public domain

from the nice-work,-baytsp dept

One of the companies that the entertainment industry hires to send out nastygrams to people it believes are file sharing illegally is BayTSP. The company tries to hunt down IP addresses and then try to notify the user. Apparently, a part of this process is also to include a link to a web form where the user can respond to the notice and tell BayTSP if you will comply with their infringement notice and remove the offending files from your computer. Except, some are noticing, that BayTSP’s method of doing this isn’t even remotely secure, so the response forms are available for anyone to see — and to respond to. You can find your own with a little help from Google.

Even worse, you could send your own notices, pretending to be BayTSP, and get people to fill out the forms instead. And, on top of that, some have discovered that BayTSP’s site has some scripting vulnerabilities such that you could create a fake complaint and get people to, say, download malware or enter credit card data. Once again demonstrating the high level of technical incompetence from the folks the RIAA and MPAA hire to piss off fans worldwide.

Filed Under: copyright notices, security
Companies: baytsp