COPYCENSE

“In the pre-race show to The Kentucky Derby, NBC ran through the challenges faced by a number of the participants, including Michael Matz, the trainer for eventual-winner Barbaro. Matz had been in a plane crash and rescued three kids. Sounds like genuine heroism.

“NBC captured this by using language from the television show The West Wing. The borrowing of The West Wing dialogue took two forms. Tom Hammond, one of NBC’s announcers, stated that Matz ‘ran into the fire to save the lives of three children,’ and then paused and repeated, ‘ran into the fire.’ For those of us who are West Wing watchers that line immediately resonates. Fictional President Jed Bartlet delivered that line in an end-of-episode speech, a line written by heartthrob speech-writer Sam Seaborn.

“NBC has already conceded the plagiarism and has said that it will no longer accept work from the responsible freelance writer. Last week, I raised the question of the relationship between plagiarism and copyright’s fair use doctrine. What should we think of this situation?”

The Faculty Blog, University of Chicago Law School. More on Plagiarism and Fair Use. May 12, 2006.

See also:

Richard Sandomir. NBC Admits Plagiarism in Feature Before Derby. The New York Times. May 11, 2006.

The Patry Copyright Blog. Lawyers Copying Lawyers. May 10, 2006.

Davida H. Isaacs. The Highest Form of Flattery? Application of the Fair Use Defense against Copyright Claims for Unauthorized Appropriation of

Litigation Documents. (.pdf preprint) Missouri Law Review. Undated.

The Faculty Blog, University of Chicago Law School. All Copying is Shallow. May 2, 2006.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the law, business, and technology of digital content. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

“In several dozen nondescript office buildings around the world, thousands of hourly workers bend over table-top scanners and haul dusty books into high-tech scanning booths. They are assembling the universal library page by page. The dream is an old one: to have in one place all knowledge, past and present. All books, all documents, all conceptual works, in all languages.

“When Google announced in December 2004 that it would digitally scan the books of five major research libraries to make their contents searchable, the promise of a universal library was resurrected. Indeed, the explosive rise of the Web, going from nothing to everything in one decade, has encouraged us to believe in the impossible again.

“But the technology that will bring us a planetary source of all written material will also, in the same gesture, transform the nature of what we now call the book and the libraries that hold them. The universal library and its ‘books’ will be unlike any library or books we have known. Pushing us rapidly toward that Eden of everything, and away from the paradigm of the physical paper tome, is the hot technology of the search engine.”

Kevin Kelly. Scan This Book! The New York Times Magazine. May 14, 2006.

Update:

O’Reilly Radar. Publisher, Be Very, Very Afraid? May 18, 2006.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the law, business, and technology of digital content. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

“This month, Toshiba’s HD-A1 high-definition DVD player hit store shelves. It’s the first marketplace volley in an absurd and pointless format war among the titans of the movie, electronics and computer industries.

“Just contemplating the rise of a new DVD format is enough to make you feel played. What’s wrong with the original DVD format, anyway? It offers brilliant picture, thundering surround sound and bonus material. The catalog of DVD movies is immense and reasonably priced. And DVD players are so cheap, they practically fall out of magazines; 82 percent of American homes have at least one DVD player.

“To electronics executives, all of this can mean only one thing: It’s time to junk that format and start over.”

David Pogue. Why the World Doesn’t Need Hi-Def DVD’s. The New York Times. May 11, 2006.

See also:

Greg Sandoval. Syncing High-Def Music With Digital Generation. News.com. May 15, 2006.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the law, business, and technology of digital content. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

“The Universal Music Group, the world’s biggest music company, has agreed to pay $12 million to settle accusations that executives paid radio programmers to play songs, according to a settlement announced yesterday. It is the largest settlement yet in an investigation by the New York attorney general that has shaken the music business.

“The office of the attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, said in documents released yesterday that Universal, a unit of Vivendi, had used a broad array of illegal ‘pay for play’ tactics to secure airplay for its music, including bribing programmers with laptop computers, tickets to sporting events and luxury hotel stays.”

Jeff Leeds. Universal Music Settles Big Payola Case. The New York Times. May 12, 2006.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the law, business, and technology of digital content. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.