eftychia: Me in kilt and poofy shirt, facing away, playing acoustic guitar behind head (Default)
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posted by [personal profile] eftychia at 07:25am on 2004-05-26

"From the beginning, government and government agencies have been subject to capture. They are more likely captured when a powerful interest is threatened by either a legal or technical change. That powerful interest too often exerts its influence within the government to get the government to protect it. The rhetoric of this protection is of course always public spirited; the reality is something different. Ideas that were as solid as rock in one age, but that, left to themselves, would crumble in another, are sustained through this subtle corruption of our political process. RCA had what the Causbys did not: the power to stifle the effect of technological change." -- Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology And The Law To Lock Down Culture And Control Creativity. (Thanks to [livejournal.com profile] fidhle who told me about this book and kept reminding me about it until I got around to downloading it. This probably won't be the only passage I quote by the time I finish reading it.)

There are 2 comments on this entry. (Reply.)
 
An example is that you can't use, say, the image of Mickey Mouse on your webpage and never will be able to because Disney is going to own his rights in perpetuity. Worse exaples are that you couldn't use Sleeping Beauty either even though the story that she originates from is not original and is in the public domain.

I guess it also means that a lot if not all fan fic is illegal and that the owners of said characters have the right to sue if they deem.

It's a rather interesting topic.

Will
 
posted by [identity profile] keith-m043.livejournal.com at 08:10am on 2004-05-26
Interesting thing about fan fic is that most companies are unofficially OK with it (as long as it doesn't get totally outrageous), but if it becomes provable that they are aware of the existance of a particular body of fan fic (such as if the author of said fan fic writes a letter to someone official in the company about it), the owner of the copyright must take the fan fic writer to court because to do otherwise is legally tantamount to just walking away from the copyright on the material that the fan is writing about. All this has to do with a requirement for a copyright holder to "make a good faith effort to protect copyright" in order to maintain it.

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