Looking for copyright criminal mugshots

Brett from Open Source Cinema sez, "We're asking people to take photos of themselves with a mug shot plate indicating their copyright criminality. Then we're going to animate the photos and have them appear in our movie, Basement Tapes, an open source documentary." Link (Thanks, Brett)

• [wynneth]

  On one hand it sounds like an awesome idea. On the other, in this world, it sounds like entrapment…. Which for those of you who don’t know, used to be this concept that the powers that be could not lure or goad you into acts of illegality and then arrest you for them, however, at least in the US the patriot act basically eliminated that…

• [Tenn]

  Right.

  To Do List:
  Post to Basement Tapes CR Criminal Documentary
  Post pictures of that AWESOME unsupervised party on Myspace (don’t forget that cool one with me, Jamie, and the four foot bong!)
  Profit?

• [Oren Beck]

  Regarding a more ominous “Mental Association”

  Declaring music sharing a crime absent ” ” around the word sharing to denote the term’s usage.

  Legitimate copyright should be respected.

  As should be the right to assign copyright to CC etc. The Creative Commons variants and the GPL mean what they say. They delineate permissible uses and terms. Which include granting sharing as a right. No part of CC or GPL includes an “association ” needing to apply an Imprimatur.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imprimatur

  Nor does any conventional copyright law make an Imprimatur mandatory!

  I can create music and freely give copies to others. They can share those copies with others IF my declaration of that being legal is clear. The truly evil mindwarp RIAA etc is spreading goes against freedom. We currently have the freedom to share music we create our selves. For the moment that is…

• [LAJames]

  I don’t understand why these people feel a sense of entitlement to potentially profit from someone else’s work without permission.

  Isn’t that basically what this is saying?

  While I understand that there are things destined for the public domain to be freely rearranged by anyone, if someone spent a year composing a masterpiece of whatever, why should someone else be allowed to copy or make a derivative of that without permission or compensation?

  Maybe there are some new questions with the Internet since YouTube is full of copyrighted videos set to copyrighted songs, but you could also make the argument that they potentially promote the artist (like radio) or that there is no profit loss by doing so for a good deal of it. That said, I don’t think sampling someone’s protected song in a new song without permission is ever okay.

  If I spent seven years writing a book, I would not be pleased if I saw that material plagiarized by someone else. And I would feel the same way about a photograph or painting that I poured my hard work and soul into. In my opinion, that is turning sinful due to the publicity machine of Creative Commons.

  Incidentally, if you don’t have permission to copy something, why is there a problem with just getting down to the hard work of being totally original?

  If you want to put something into the public domain, that’s up to you, but otherwise, I think we should respect the copyrights. If everything was free to use by everyone, lots of stuff would never be made for our enjoyment.

• [Oren Beck]

  #4

  “I don’t understand why these people feel a sense of entitlement to potentially profit from someone else’s work without permission.”

  There is a vast gulf between that which you invoke of use absent permission and the fair right to grant usage permissions. RIAA et all are seeking to create a world where all music would need to be unfree and only issue forth from approved distributors. And even more evil is their desired new concept. That ANY pretense of ownership as opposed to limited “rental” is dead. After all- if you can sell a copy of your own work directly over the internet you have no need of RIAA. So? Do tell me then what is wrong with that?