Why Racialicious Went On SOPA Strike
PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.
And, already there are indications that companies are interested in bringing broad actions for infringement against organizations that most people would consider perfectly legal. Advertising giant GroupM recently asked its entertainment industry customers to compile a list of “sites dedicated to infringement,” not unlike what’s found under PROTECT IP. Universal Music, Warner Bros. and Paramount were three key providers to that list, which ended up covering a large number of perfectly legitimate sites including the famed Internet Archive (widely recognized as the library for the internet). It also included numerous innovative startups that are frequently used by content creators to get their works out, such as SoundCloud and Vimeo. Even more worrisome, it included a variety of publications and blogs, including Vibe Magazine, the quintessential hip hop and R&B magazine founded by Quincy Jones, as well as Complex, a popular lifestyle magazine recently recognized as one of the most valuable startups in New York.
Even worse, it appears that Universal Music also included the personal website of one of its own top artists, 50Cent. The hiphop star has a personal website as well as a website owned by Universal Music. The personal website is much more popular… and it appeared on the infringement list. Suddenly, you can see how letting companies declare what sites are dedicated to infringement can lead to them looking to stifle speech and competition.
— “The Definitive Post On Why SOPA And Protect IP Are Bad, Bad Ideas” by Mike Masnic for TechDirt
So why did Racialicious go dark yesterday?
SOPA and PIPA are bad business for the internet, but are particularly problematic for those of us who engage in cultural critique. If we discuss TV shows, music, movies, comics, and video games, that means that we will illustrate our points with music videos, clips from TV shows, promotional trailers, scenes that make it to YouTube, and scanned images. And all of those things could technically be put under a copyright claim.
We rely on the really tenuous concept of Fair Use to continue to exist. We have some legal protections, but not as many some groups of people (like documentary film makers) who have fought these issues in court. Without fair use Byron Hurt wouldn’t have been able to create Beyond Beats and Rhymes and Sut Jhally would not have been able to create Dreamworlds 3 – if they had to seek permission from the person they were critiquing they wouldn’t have been able to use the material. The problem is there are no hard and fast rules for Fair Use. The EFF cautions us to guidelines and best practices but it is really a matter of what will stand up in court.
I’ve talked to Patricia Aufderheide, director of American University’s Center for Social Media and author of Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright, off and on for about two years on these issues. She has encouraged folks like me to continue to do our work since, in her summation, fair use is part and parcel with freedom of speech.
But as the owner of an indie media site, there are some serious risks with that. A while back, Boing Boing pointed their readers to a piece by Waxy, who talked about how his transformative project involving Miles Davis turned into a legal nightmare. The quick and dirty – Waxy cleared the samples he used for the album tribute, but pixelated the image cover believing that the work was changed enough under the guidelines. The judge on the case disagreed. While Waxy and his legal team believed they were in the right, he eventually settled for $32,500 – just to stop the mounting legal fees. Aufderheide, who I interviewed for a piece that will run next week on the ONA site, says that this is part of the process and that by exercising free speech, we are also accepting some of the risk that things won’t be seen our way.
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