So, updating the #Copyright YEAR has no legal bearing as Copyright protection is a fixed duration.- Author-owned works is lifetime of author + 50 years (70 or longer in some countries)- Entity-owned & pseudonym (not revealed) is 95 years from FIRST publication
copyright
So, updating the #Copyright YEAR has no legal bearing as Copyright protection is a fixed duration.
- Author-owned works is lifetime of author + 50 years (70 or longer in some countries)
- Entity-owned & pseudonym (not revealed) is 95 years from FIRST publication
- Unpublished is 120 years from first creation
Which means that it is pointless to list multiple years or a range of years. This is according to the International agreements related to Copyright, like the Berne Convention and the TRIPS Agreement.
I am excited to see the publication of advance articles in Samuel Beckett Today from a special edition based on a symposium about Samuel Beckett in Central Europe https://brill.com/view/journals/sbt/aop/issue.xml
I wrote about 'The Legal Dramas of Samuel Beckett: Copyright Law and Human Rights in the European Union'
Alexander Hartley wrote a piece about copyright from a different angle, 'Is Beckett’s Drama ‘Stopped’? Accounting for the Aesthetics of Theatrical Copyright' https://brill.com/view/journals/sbt/aop/article-10.1163-18757405-tat00005/article-10.1163-18757405-tat00005.xml
Anita Rákóczy has written about Károly Kazimir’s Opening Speech before the Hungarian Premiere of Waiting for Godot (1965) https://brill.com/view/journals/sbt/aop/article-10.1163-18757405-tat00007/article-10.1163-18757405-tat00007.xml
I look forward to seeing the final versions of some of the other contributions to the collection.
#copyright #EUlaw #EUpol #theatre #performance #drama #Ireland #SamuelBeckett
Edited 87d ago
I still don't understand how NFT "ownership" works as far as #Copyright laws are concerned. First thing we need to understand is that most countries do not allow relinquishing/transferring an author's Moral Rights.So, if you buy NFT arts, the author still have complete Moral Rights. #IANAL #TINLA
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:mf5dzzqkp7fnmby6blfeljwj/post/3m3pepajo622l
Milestones for the Deep Backfile project.
Back in 2020-2021, while the Penn Libraries were largely closed, many of our librarians worked from home on the Deep Backfile project. Faced with more demand than ever for online access to our collections while most users couldn't go into our libraries, we researched the copyrights of some of the many thousands of journals, magazines, newspapers, and other serials in our collections.
https://everybodyslibraries.com/2024/08/13/milestones-for-the-deep-backfile-project/
Edited 1y ago
Denmark seems to be pursuing the idea of protecting people from "AI" deep fakes by addressing people's image as part of copyright law. [1]
I applaud the idea of doing something about this, and this is a better approach than none at all, but it's not quite how I would pursue it.
For one thing, there are a number of places where people are innocently captured in images that this will create complications for. And for another, I don't think it's powerful enough to address the real problem.
The "MOO" community (MOO is MUD, Object-Oriented, and MUD is Multiple-User Dungeon, and Dungeon was one of the first text-based interactive fiction games, also called Zork), this came up a long time ago. Ironically, since MOO is entirely text, images were not involved. But there was still the issue of appropriating people's view of themselves for ill purposes, and this was richly discussed.
MOO, which had its greatest popularity in the 1990's, before Second Life overshadowed it, functioned as a kind of textual sketch of things to come. It was a coarse level of detail because its technical layer doesn't allow for super-elaborate detailing, but that forced the social aspect to be the focus rather than the technology. Modern systems purport to capture reality, but they often get so side-tracked on making things photo-real visceral experiences that they give short shrift to the full complexity of human social interaction. So they're still catching up to some of the social issues MOO explored decades ago.
In Julian Dibbell's fascinating book "My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World", which you can and should buy if you can afford to, but which the author arranged to be freely downloadable as a PDF for those who could not afford it [2], the focus is on "A Rape In Cyberspace", he explores some of these issues. Originally published in The Village Voice and later adapted for a book, this story is, in the author's words, "a True Account of the Case of the Infamous Mr. Bungle, and of the Author's Journey, in Consequence Thereof, to the Heart of a Half-Real World Called LambdaMOO".
This story will not tell you how to understand what Denmark is doing, but I think it informs my way of thinking about this issue.
At its core, both situations--the issue in cyberspace and the modern issues in the real world--are not "infringements" (in the way copyright would talk about them) but "violations" in the way a person's sense of self matters.
Some people will point to rape as a matter of physical violation, but just as others are quick to say it's not a crime of sex, it's a crime of violence, I would similarly say it's a crime of violation, of taking control of a person's sense of self. And that's what's in common with these other matters, like grabbing someone's image.
We don't presently have a standard for this, and like many matters of human endeavor, there is extraordinary nuance. Fair use, one might say. Certainly parody is one place where people don't have complete say. The sitting President wants to go after critics for disparaging his good name, for example, and ordinarily the disparaging of someone's good name might be seen as a violation, but in certain realms of public discourse, especially for public figures, we allow and insist on it.
This is partly true, too, because even underlying the issue of violation is the issue of power. The law is really at its core protecting those powerless to protect themselves. So, for example, while it might be a violation to appropriate the good work of an actor who's just struggling to eat, selling their image royalty-free, appropriating the name of a politician who can with the stroke of a pen cut the food supply of millions is not exactly exerting power over them, certainly not unconditionally dominating power.
So we should be careful in our understanding of good law to understand that it seeks not a bright line of pain to itself become a weapon, but rather just an ability to tip power balances back toward the middle, making the world an even battle among people who are born into different levels of power and who cannot therefore fairly be expected to solve their own problems.
I've swept through many issues here, but I have decades of thought underlying my reaction to Denmark's idea, informed by the lucky accident that I was there at the time LambdaMOO sketched the future.
I sometimes note in conversations with people for whom a topic is new and hypothetical that they will say "I wonder what would happen if..." and I reply in the past tense saying "Oh, this is what happened." Because I don't have to speculate. I saw it. It mightn't happen reliably that way again. Many possibilities were in play. But even those were tangibly close to my experience. I have rich, detailed thought because I lived at least one version of it. Just wanted to share that.
[1] https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/07/deepfake-legislation-denmark-digital-id/
#AI #IP #Law #Crime #Copyright #DeepFake #DeepFakes #violation #rape
Edited 14d ago
#OTD in 1886.
The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works is signed. The treaty provides authors, musicians, poets, painters, and other creators with the means to control how their works are used, by whom, and on what terms.
#OTD in 1911.
The U.K. Copyright Act consolidates copyright law in the British Empire and confirms the six libraries to which a copy of every book published in the U.K. must be deposited by the publisher: the British Museum Library (London); the Bodleian Library (Oxford); the Advocates Library (Edinburgh); the National Library of Wales (Aberystwyth); Trinity College Dublin; and Cambridge University Library.
This week's net.wars, "Disharmony", finds Meta allegedly engaging in piracy and changing its content moderation policies, and network neutrality dying (for now?) in the US: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2025/01/10/disharmony/ #copyright #eu #OnlineSafety #NetWars
#OTD in 1914.
In New York City the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers is established to protect the copyrighted musical compositions of its members.
It was founded by Victor Herbert, George Botsford, Silvio Hein, Irving Berlin, Louis Hirsch, John Raymond Hubbell, Gustave Kerker, & Jean Schwartz; Glen MacDonough; publishers George Maxwell and Jay Witmark & copyright attorney Nathan Burkan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Society_of_Composers,_Authors_and_Publishers
ASCAP archives at NYPL:
https://archives.nypl.org/mus/22936
What on earth, SoundCloud??
"In the absence of a separate agreement that states otherwise, You explicitly agree that your Content may be used to inform, train, develop or serve as input to artificial intelligence or machine intelligence technologies or services as part of and for providing the services."
https://soundcloud.com/terms-of-use
via @sarahdal https://crispsandwi.ch/@sarahdal/114477755873097160
This week's net.wars, "Conundrum", goes to a meeting on copyright's "existential threat" to generative AI: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2025/07/11/conundrum/ #NetWars #Copyright #AI
Last night, @pluralistic was in conversation with @mariafarrell to mark ORG's 20th birthday.
This wide-ranging conversation covers everything from the 'Internet dimension' of policy-making to copyright in the age of AI and how to fight for digital rights.
Plus much more!
Missed it live? No worries, you can watch it in full on Youtube 📺
https://www.youtube.com/live/M9H2An_D6io
#ORG20 #digitalrights #corydoctorow #AI #copyright #dataprotection #bigtech
Edited 118d ago
This week's net.wars, "Big Bang", finds a folk musician fighting to get back the rights over his long-ago recorded music, and chronicles the first week of age verification in the UK: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2025/08/01/big-bang/ #NetWars #HumanRights #Copyright #FolkMusic #AgeVerification
A best-selling Vancouver author has launched a class-action lawsuit against Nvidia, claiming the multi-trillion dollar tech company illegally used his and other Canadian writers' works to train artificial intelligence large language models (LLM). https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/vancouver-author-leads-class-actions-against-ai-giants-1.7595962
J.B. MacKinnon is named as the representative plaintiff in the claim, which says his books, The 100-Mile Diet and The Once and Future World, were part of a 196,640-book dataset that Nvidia used without paying a licensing fee or securing consent to acquire or use the works. #cdnpoli #copyright #AI
I learned today that because of the strong Moral Rights protection in the #Philippines , it is not possible for Authors/Creators (defined as "natural persons" by law) to dedicate/release their work to the #PublicDomain .
And even if we use 0BSD, MIT-0, CC0, and other similar public-domain-equivalent licenses, we can still sue anyone who:
1. Misused our name
2. Misrepresented us
3. Misused our work (downstream)
All under Moral Rights because we can never waived it under Philippine law. Even with a promise not to sue anyone is not a guarantee.
So, saying, "This work is under 0BSD/MIT-0/CC0 and I will never sue anyone for whatever reason", won't work under Philippine law. The Creator/Author will always have their Moral Rights as the creator/author of the work. It's completely up to you to trust that they will fulfill their promise. 🤪
Edited 98d ago
Perhaps don't launch businesses that rely on breaking the law? Just a thought.
'If the appeals court denies the petition…the emerging company may be doomed. As Anthropic argued, it now "faces hundreds of billions of dollars in potential damages liability at trial in four months"…that involves "up to seven million potential claimants, whose works span a century of publishing history," each possibly triggering a $150,000 fine.'
A class action lawsuit is being prepared against Anthropic over their downloading of copyrighted material from pirate websites.
If you're an author, and your books have been registered with the US Copyright Office, you may be eligible to be included, and thus receive damages.
The plaintiff's lawyers are collecting contact information so that they can ensure eligible authors receive formal notice of the class action.
More information and the form are here: https://www.lieffcabraser.com/anthropic-author-contact/
#PleaseBoost and pass on to any authors you know not on the fediverse.
#WritersOfMastodon #WritingCommunity #AI #Anthropic #copyright #author
@writingcommunity @bookstodon