’)Apparently HBO is removing all those video excerpts of yesterday’s concert at the Lincoln Memorial. I’m no copyright expert, but I really wish someone would go ahead and post clips on their blog or other website, then get HBO to defend the idea that they own a public concert given on federal property in the middle of the inauguration of America’s next president.
Are they having YouTube take down clips from their broadcast, or are they having YouTube take down any video from the event at all? If they’re having people who are posting clips from HBOs’ coverage, then they’re within their rights. If some guy with a cell phone camera took video of it, and posted it, and HBO compelled YouTube to take it down, then they’re in the wrong there.
Feel free to take the lead, Oliver…
J.
Have to go along with SFC. The event is public, but the accounts of it can be copyright. You are not entitled to use someone else’s account of an event even if you saw it and even if you paid for the event to be produced. Think theater review.
OTOH, private accounts and images collected by others of public events are not copyright for HBO.
SFC – they’re taking any clips from anybody. According to Ben Smith,
I would however go further than agreement with you that this is manifestly wrong. This is a public event, part of our national heritage. No contract should be made with HBO or anyone for broadcast rights unless it includes the provision that this material is to be offered under a Creative Commons license, allowing the public the right to remix and critique. I expect Lawrence Lessig will have some interesting stuff to say on this.
But then he has been on the forefront of the fight against the ridiculous asininity of copyright law in the country for years. Another example of how our copyright law actually hampers art and creativity in this country which is near and dear to me: Nina Paley’s wonderful animated film Sita Sings the Blues. As Roger Ebert discusses in his review, this wonderful film can’t be distributed because it uses Jazz music sung by Anette Hanshaw, a singer from the 20s and 30s. Her recordings are in the public domain, having expired copyright, but the songs she sings have the compositions owned by massive studios, who have kept them in copyright due to the insane extension of copyright terms to 80 years or more. The composers of these works are dead. The studios contributed nothing to the creation of these songs, yet they are using their lawyers to prevent distribution of a wonderful film which would probably garner much more interest in them than they could hope for any other way. The film has become an emblem for QuestionCopyright. We have to get works like Sita and the public interest video of our national heritage in the inauguration out of copyright jail!
My favorite bit is that CSPAN’s broadcasts are copyrighted, and it is against the rules to bring your own camera into the House and Senate chambers. So I couldn’t go to the Capitol and make a recording of something of interest to me, and post it on YouTube. I’d need to get CSPAN’s permission to use their footage. I have no idea how willing they are to offer such use, but it just seems to be rather silly for the government to forbid its citizens from recording their actions.
It shouldn’t surprise me though, given the number of people arrested for the non-crime of videotaping police.
HBO allowed every cable network on the planet to air it for free as well as streamed the entire thing over the internet. In addition, the broadcast is the official property of the Presidential Inaugural Committee, NOT HBO.
HBO has a six-month exclusive license to it, after which the Inaugural Committee has control of it, making it public domain as a government organization. Considering the cost HBO probably expended to handle the logistics of a million-attended open-air concert that, I would add once more, they allowed everyone on earth to watch for free when it was airing live, that doesn’t really seem like an excruciatingly bad deal.
streamed the entire thing over the internet
Not quite. They blacked out Gene Robinson’s prayer.
So, I saw Malia taking pictures of Beyonce. Are they gonna want those too?
Um, pictures of Beyonce? I want them.