First, we have the Kopimi symbol, which is Piratbyrån‘s opposite-of-copyright symbol (i.e. you’re allowed to copy this, in fact please do so). This is then immediately followed by the word “Copyright”. And then to further muck things up, a Creative Commons notice.

What? Cognitive dissonance? In my Internets?

Actually, no. This is all easily explained by the third line: “This notice is not an endorsement of intellectual property law.”

You see, I would love it if I could just slap the Kopimi symbol up there and free everything you see here from the prison of copyright just like that. Unfortunately, that’s not how copyright works.

Wikipedia says “Kopimi is similar to the CC0 license created by Creative Commons.” This is inaccurate, and I’d change it if there were a source for me to cite (Which, since I’ve posted this, now there is, but it would look really bad if I changed it myself, so somebody else should go do it). You see, CC0 contains legal language which, to the extent possible under law, legally releases the work in question into the public domain. Kopimi, on the other hand, is a picture, a word, and a not particularly well-explained website. It is not legally binding.

Perhaps this is exactly what Piratbyrån intended: who cares that it’s not legally binding, because we ignore copyright law anyway. I agree with that sentiment. However, I also acknowledge the reality that not everyone is Piratbyrån. Some people would refuse to make use of a free work if it’s still, legally, under traditional copyright. So I need to add some fine print, for their sake.

Thus, first I add the traditional copyright notice, including the internationally recognized word “Copyright”. This is because, for better or for worse, Plankhead does hold copyright on everything here. I don’t have a choice in the matter. That’s the law.

However, instead of saying All Rights Reserved, the next line is a declaration of Creative Commons licensing. Why the Attribution license, and not the aforementioned CC0? Because plagiarism is bad. If there’s any reason why some kind of copyright-ish law should exist, it would be to protect against that.

Of course, I’m not really sure that the legal system should be used to prevent plagiarism. But, again, the people I’m writing this fine print for care about what’s legal and what’s not, so I might as well throw that in there. If you’re a free-spirited pirate, you’re ignoring everything after the big pyramid with the K, anyway.

Speaking of which, why am I using the Kopimi symbol instead of the perfectly good Creative Commons logos? Because to the people who don’t understand copyright law, and don’t read the fine print, Creative Commons has a branding problem. Says Nina Paley:

“Creative Commons” means “Non-Commercial” to most people. Fighting it is a sisyphean task. So I’m stuck with a branding problem. As long as I use any Creative Commons license, most people will think it prohibits commercial use.

Kopimi, on the other hand, is a brand without connotations to most people. We have the opportunity to establish it as a “do whatever the hell you want” symbol, because that is, in fact, what it is.

So that’s what’s going on with our copyright notice. The legal language is a necessary evil, but unless you’re a lawyer, ignore it all and do whatever you want. As long as you don’t try to pass off something from Plankhead as your own, it’s all good.

A court has ruled that it is legal to remove works from the public domain and put them back under copyright in the United States.

Okay. That’s it. I can’t take these ridiculous decisions anymore. I’ve been thinking this for a long time, but now I’m just gonna come out and say it:

Intellectual property law in the United States no longer serves the public, and until it has been reformed to do so, it is to be ignored.

We the people of the United States of America have the right, and duty, to disregard and oppose these unconstitutional sections of the law. They no longer serves to, as stated in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution, “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” The law in its current incarnation actively impedes the Progress of Science and the Arts, and the limited Times are now so lengthy so as to be effectively unlimited. Copyright, patent, and trademark law together not only no longer matches the description in I.8.8, but it in many cases violates the First Amendment.

I believe in the necessity for there to be laws which promote the progress of science and art, and grant the creative persons responsible for such advances the exclusive right to claim a reasonable level of authorial control for a limited time. The former need is not being met by the law at all, and the latter is incidentally met in an unsatisfactory way by the current overarching and easily-abused law. But by upholding the current useful portions of the law, we validate the entirety of it.

As a citizen of the United States, I hereby declare that I do not consent to governance by Intellectual Property law, including, but not limited to, the current laws pertaining to copyrights, patents, and trademarks. I encourage the like-minded people of the United States to join me in affirming our non-consent, and continuing to do so until the law once again serves the public good as outlined in our Constitution.

In regards to my own work, I would appreciate it if the spirit of the Creative Commons licenses I release them under were respected, but please do so out of goodwill, and not out of a false sense of legal obligation to do so.

To the extent possible under law, Zacqary Adam Green has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to Intellectual Property Law Has Gone Quite Far Enough and Is Now Hereby Null and Void and the header image preceding it. This work is published from the United States. Not that any of this matters as of this writing, of course, because copyright is null and void; I’m just saying this for when one day it’s valid again.

If you go watch my Hitler video on YouTube, you will now see an annotation stating that I have waived all copyright to it, with the help of Creative Commons‘ CC0 language. It is now in the public domain.

That doesn’t mean anyone can just go around claiming ownership of it though. It means that nobody owns it. It belongs to everybody now. Go do whatever you want with it. I’d appreciate it if you give me credit for it, but that’s by no means required.

Anyway, to make this absolutely, positively clear:

There. Enjoy your gift, world. Merry Kwanzaa or whatever.

One the most enduring (and consistently entertaining) Internet memes of the past few years has been remixes of the bunker scene from the German film, The Downfall: Hitler and the End of the Third Reich (aka Der Untergang). [...] In a depressing twist, these remixes are reportedly disappearing from YouTube, thanks to Constantin Film (the movie’s producer and distributor) and YouTube’s censorship-friendly automated filtering system, Content I.D. Because the Content I.D. filter permits a copyright owner to disable any video that contains its copyrighted content — whether or not that video contains other elements that make the use a noninfringing fair use — a content owner can take down a broad swath of fair uses with the flick of a switch. It seems that’s exactly what Constantin Film has chosen to do.

Oliver Hirschbiegel, the film’s director, does not condone this. He says, “”Someone sends me the links every time there’s a new one. I think I’ve seen about 145 of them! Many times the lines are so funny, I laugh out loud, and I’m laughing about the scene that I staged myself! You couldn’t get a better compliment as a director. I think it’s only fair if now it’s taken as part of our history, and used for whatever purposes people like.”

You know who else isn’t happy about it? Hitler.

Someone had to do it, so I did:

But once you have a font on your computer, you can use it for anything, right? Well, it depends. Sometimes that $40 only gives you the right to display the font on your screen and print it out. Can you use it in an image on the web? Sure, unless maybe you can’t. I don’t know. How can they even prove you used their font, though? A lot of them look really similar. What are these things legally protected by, anyway?

Both the exorbitant prices and confusing legal situation make it difficult for anyone but professional graphic designers and/or established companies that employ them to use a particularly wide variety of fonts. The web, however, has given almost everyone who can read a CSS tutorial the ability to be a graphic designer, but for a long time font licensing has stood in the way of using anything but nine free(-ish) fonts that everyone (maybe) has on their computer. Fortunately, this situation is being rectified; soon you’ll be able to pay $78467 to license a font for web use, once they’ve figured out how to deal with “illegal uses”. Whatever the method of preventing these illegal uses may be, some 16-year-old kid in Bangladesh has already cracked it.

But seriously, 40 dollars? For a font? And then maybe I can’t even show anyone what I do with it? Again, I know making fonts is hard work, but are they really that valuable? Especially if it’s the sort of font you use for one small project and then never need again. These prices might have made sense when fonts were the sort of thing that you’d take out of a box and arrange on your printing press, but that’s just not how things work anymore.

So, naturally, Google is showing Cyanogen their thanks for increasing the Google-use of 30,000 people by sending him a Cease and Desist letter. Wait, what?

Well, apparently some of Google’s applications aren’t open source, such as the Android Market (which allows you to give Google money indirectly by buying apps from developers, who then give a portion of their money to Google). Sure, you can easily download and install these apps yourself from the freely available developer repository, but Cyanogen had the audacity to save 30,000 end users the trouble of doing all that just so they could continue using Google’s products and making them money. That constitutes “distribution,” which only licensed developers who sent in $25 and the filled-out form from the back of the comic book work for Open Handset Alliance members can do. Never mind that there aren’t any alternatives to many of these applications, and they’re kind of essential for a lot of Android’s usefulness.

Admittedly, under the current Jurassic-era copyright law, Google has the legal right to do this. Cyanogen does not have the resources to license their software, thus he does not have the license to distribute it. But considering that Android, as a whole, is a free and open source operating system, and that Google has nothing to lose from CyanogenMOD and much to gain, this is a real dick move by the “Don’t Be Evil” company.

So this means artists who hope to make a living will now have to rethink their business models, because basing your livelihood on the assumption that all people will pay you for the privilege of merely experiencing your work is on par with [wikipedia]Young Earth creationism[/wikipedia] in la-la-la-I-can’t-hear-you factor. But never fear, artistic community, because a ton of niche nerd fandoms have come to terms with that assumption since the heyday of [wikipedia]Usenet[/wikipedia] (because many of them probably had a hand in inventing it). They all operate with similar conventions, but because everything is better with cartoon purple foxes, the example I will explain is the furry subculture.

One of the major cornerstones of furry interest is the visual artwork. Artists draw and paint all sorts of anthropomorphic animal characters, and many of the popular ones make good money selling prints of their work at conventions. The same goes for comic book creators and, more recently, novel authors. While these works sell to adoring fans, much of them are also freely available to view online. But the real money, especially for less universally known artists, is in the sales of commissions. Another cornerstone of furry interest is the “fursona,” an animal character to represent oneself. Many furries would like pictures of “themselves,” and pay artists to do this for them. Once the commissions are finished, the commissioner and artist display them prominently all over the Internet.

Deconstruct this market, and an interesting theory emerges. Artists create works on their own time, and this attracts fans. Many of these fans buy physical copies of the art to show their support. Some others have an idea for a particular work of art they’d like to see produced, and commission the artist to do so. Once this artwork is finished, it is displayed both for the pleasure of the commissioner and everyone else who wants to see it.

These ideas can be scaled up and applied to many other situations. Musicians are having a lot of success with using recordings to attract fans who’ll support their work and come to concerts, and some are doing pretty well with taking commissions. That’s hardly surprising, as Mozart and Beethoven worked in a similar fashion. But it’s not such a stretch to see narrative and interactive media succeeding in a similar fashion. How many times have people in the world thought, “I wish someone would make a movie about [this]“, or “I wish there was a video game where you could [do this]“? Films and games are often larger projects than the budget of a single fan can finance, but Gabe Newell of Valve already thinks a bunch of interested fans could fund a game.

It’s not clear if that would work in our current understanding of the world. Would large projects like films and video games still be able to make a profit if they were funded by fans and then released into the wild, depending on the goodwill of more fans to pay for them after the fact?

To be honest, I hope not. I really hope that the financial implications of producing artwork changes so radically that it no longer makes sense for business to be involved. That’s not to say I hope artists will be unable to support themselves; after all, there’s a big difference in making a living and making a profit. As evidenced by most of what comes out of Hollywood and the LA music industry, “content creators” motivated by profit are generally hacks. Artists motivated by living — the world around them, their lives inspiring their art — are the ones who actually produce things that are worthwhile.

That’s what one sees in these artists who draw animal people. They love and care about what they do, and the money is a side benefit. Few of them get particularly rich from what they do, but that doesn’t matter. It’s this kind of situation that reminds me, file-sharing is not killing music, movies, video games, or anything. It’s killing the artistic cancer that is the copyright industry.

In other words, if you’re not going to draw pictures, write music, make movies, or develop games because there’s no money in it, good. You have the wrong attitude.

Same-sex marriage now violates intellectual property laws too! Who'dve thunk?

Remember that ridiculous anti-gay marriage ad which I made even more ridiculous by replacing the soundtrack with “It’s Raining Men”? Apparently the National Organization for Nomnomnom isn’t too pleased with that sort of behavior. Parody ads left and…well, who am I kidding, they’re all left…have been removed from YouTube because of NOM’s bitching and whining and DMCA takedown notices (Mine hasn’t been touched, probably because the audio confuses the Content ID robots). Included in this crusade against legal and fair use was one for which the creators were recognized as “Homo Heroes” for their brilliance: a group of Reddit readers spliced the word “interracial” in wherever “same-sex” was in the original ad.

NOM has succeeded at infuriating the entire Internet again, but this time it’s personal. If anything spreads faster than a viral YouTube video, it’s a removed YouTube video. Congratulations, National Organization for Marriage, now both gay people and copyright reformers hate you. Now those two groups will converge, and you will face butt pirates.

Sorry, I had to.

UPDATE: YouTube is apparently giving NOM preferential treatment in their own takedown notice predicament with Perez Hilton. It seems highly unlike Google to be supportive of their cause, so I’m gonna chalk this one up to…something else. I don’t know what.

No, says the Motion Picture Association of America. Besides, why would you want to do this? There’s a perfectly reasonable alternative: point a video camera at the screen!

MPAA shows how to videorecord a TV set from timothy vollmer on Vimeo.

Two things:

1. Not every teacher has a high-quality monitor and camcorder, so it would cost educational institutions an enormous amount of money before this ridiculously convoluted workaround could produce usable results.
2. The jokes write themselves.

As a result, your video is blocked everywhere except in these locations:
American Samoa, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Christmas Island, Cocos (Keeling) Islands, Cuba, Fiji, France, Germany, Guam, Heard Island and McDonald Islands, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kiribati, Mexico, Nauru, Netherlands, New Zealand, Niue, Norfolk Island, Northern Mariana Islands, Papua New Guinea, Puerto Rico, Solomon Islands, South Korea, Spain, Tokelau, Tonga, Tuvalu, United Kingdom, United States, United States Virgin Islands, Vanuatu

So, wait, where is it blocked, then? Most of the countries I’m not seeing on there don’t have their own versions of YouTube. Um…China? Is it blocked in China? Oh, no, that’s all of YouTube, sorry.

I’m very confused. Oh well. I’d imagine that it’s still accessible everywhere regardless, now that I submitted the fair use dispute. This is the third time I’ve had to do that, and it’s kind of annoying. Why can’t I just submit the fair use claim when I upload the video? I know it’s got copyrighted music, I state that in the description, so let’s just cut to the chase, shall we?