The Duke Law and Technology Review has released a special edition dedicated to examining the legal and philosophical legacy of John Perry Barlow: co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; junior lyricist for the Grateful Dead; biofuel entrepreneur; philosopher; poet; hacker Zelig; and driven, delightful weirdo.

Pat Aufderheide sez,

When is it OK for me to put copyrighted material on e-reserves for students?

I've got an ancient VHS and the company that made it is defunct. Can I copy it to DVD for a prof's class?

A student's thesis analyzes advertisements and includes some of them.

Pat from American University's Center for Social Media sez, "We're excited to announce the launch of a
Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Poetry,
cofacilitated by WCL-AU's Peter Jaszi, UCB's Jennifer Urban, Kate Coles from the Poetry Foundation, and Center for Social Media's Pat Aufderheide. — Read the rest

Making a video and hoping not to get sued? Check out American University's Center for Social Media Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video, now with video explanation:

American University's Center for Social Media and AU Washington College of Law's Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, in collaboration with Stanford Law School's Fair Use Project, are launching a new video explaining how online video creators can make remixes, mashups, and other common online video genres with the knowledge that they are staying within copyright law.

The LA Times's Joseph Menn has a great, well-researched feature article on the history of the copyright for the image of Mickey Mouse as portrayed in the earliest Disney cartoons — and the theory that Disney made mistakes early on with its copyright registration, placing images of that specific Mickey (not the Mickey we know today) in the public domain. — Read the rest

Kembrew sez,

American University Professors Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi — who were behind the very successful Documentary Filmmakers Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use — just released a new study that focuses on user generated video content. The study, titled "Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video," will be presented and discussed on Monday, Jan.

Documentary film-makers are often hobbled by copyright — the insurers and studios won't let them release their movies until every single copyrighted component is licensed, no matter that they're clearly legal fair use. American University's Center for Social Media released the Documentary Filmmakers' Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use tries to appress this by helping insurers and filmmakers understand what is, and isn't fair use. — Read the rest

The entertainment companies often tell us that "fair use isn't a right, it's a defense." It's techincally true, but legally disingenous. As my cow-orker Fred Von Lohmann noted today in a mailing list post, "I've heard Peter Jaszi say on several occasions (and more eloquently), First Amendment is like fair use, technically invoked as a defense in court, but that doesn't stop us from talking about our *right* to free speech."