The International Olympics Committee has been using copyright to suppress videos of the event.

If you look at the result for the top YouTube hit on on Google video search for “luge death“, that video has been deleted by YouTube due to a copyright claim by the IOC.

That’s the same story for a lot of the results for the videos you get if you search for “luge death” on YouTube.

The IOC has also been trying to remove a video put up by blogger Steve Pate at Not Just the News Network. However, the videos were still up at the time of this post.

Interestingly, the Huffington Post and CBS News seem to still be hosting the video, with the former also showing pictures.

My comments

By all accounts, the luge track was ridiculously dangerous, and faster than it had ever been before. With lugers reaching speeds of 95 miles per hour, many commented that they were being treated like crash-test dummies. (See the picture at NJNN.)

This was a tragic death but the IOC’s attempts to suppress the videos of it are pathetic, wrong, and immoral. The IOC has just gotten so used to controlling anything and everything remotely connected to the Olympics, the word “Olympic”, or any competitors, that I think it’s on autopilot as far as automatically using DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) notices regardless of the newsworthiness of a brief excerpt, which is all that the NJNN blog used.

First of all, the only reason that the IOC could possibly think that they could tell someone to post or not post content relating to the Olympics is the copyright laws. In the US, anyway, the copyright laws are based on the copyright cluase of the Constitution

To 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.

So how does the Olympic committee censoring the luge tragedy videos promote the useful arts?

I reject the idea that the video needs to be banned out of respect for the luger’s family. If anything, the video needs to be spread far and wide to show the Olympic organizers’ culpability in putting up unbelievably low barriers on the sides of the luge course.

Isn’t it strange that there’s supposed to be a separate category of people (reporters) who are authorized to view primary sources, and they they’re supposed to tell us what happened, but we can’t see for ourselves? That worked for the newspaper and TV era, but with the Internet, there’s no reason at all for people not to be able to see the actual news occurring and make up their minds for themselves instead of hearing newsmen debate current events.

Finally, under Canadian law (Steve Pate is Canadian, and NNJN is a Canadian site), there is explicit permission under the law to use brief excerpts under “fail dealing” (the Canadian version of “fair use”).

Other blogs following the story include TechDirt and Michael Geist. Discussion at Slashdot. Direct download link for the video.

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So how do you get paid for the content you write, and also give your (monetary) appreciation of those you read? For some, the answer is advertising.

Another payment solution (not involving advertising) which was hot in the 1990s was micro-payments. I.e., payments of less than $10 or so, even as small as a tenth of a cent. Most of the micropayments sites shriveled up leaving a trail of Paypal “Donate” buttons as the only way for most content-producers to receive donations.

Flattr.com is a new twist on that which might just succeed. Flattr was announced by Peter Sunde, former spokesman for The Pirate Bay, a Swedish BitTorrent site.

How Flattr works

Here’s how it’ll work, according to the YouTube on the Flattr site:

Up until now it’s been hard to give or small amounts of money easily for content. With Flattr, you set a flat fee that you’re willing to pay for content on the Internet each month.

Then, when you read or view content on the Web, you click the Flattr button to “flatter” producers whose content you like. Like a cake that you cut up in slices, at the end of the month, your flat fee (say $5) is split up among all the places you Flattr’d.

The website name “Flattr” is a play on both “flatter” and “flat-rate fee“.

My comments

The problem with content payments so far has been the clumsiness and difficulty of paying at each place you read an article or view a movie. Also, the credit card companies want a cut, and they don’t want to settle for just a few percent of 1 cent, which means you have to have a minimum payment to make the whole thing worthwhile. And if you pay a dollar at each content site you like, that can quickly add up.

But Flattr may solve the problem by aggregating small payments into bigger ones and sending them out all at once. And you get an “all-you-can-eat” model where you don’t have to worry about spending too much.

Unanswered questions

Some questions that might determine whether Flattr is going to be a success include:

• How will the site determine who is the true owner of the content, and whether that owner is the one being paid?
• Can you set your favorite content-producers to get payments every month instead of clicking Flattr buttons again and again?
• Will content be presented for free and Flattr presented as an option? Or will teasers be presented for free and the content shown only after it’s flattr’d?
• What if you don’t Flattr any content-producers in a given month? Will the flat-fee be saved up for the next month?
• If you click a Flattr button multiple times, will that content-producer get multiple slices of your flat fee?
• How much, if any, would Flattr get as a cut for running servers and paying staff?
• What about security, and preventing people from unknowingly Flattring a site?

Resources

Flattr

TorrentFreak article

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But is that really true?

Sort of.

Copyright and Public Performance

Regardless of what the NFL’s “policy” might be, people wouldn’t have to follow what they just because of their policy.

What gives force to their policy is the copyright law on public performance. The purpose behind that law was to prevent people from buying a playwright’s play and performing it and taking the profit from it without any going to the original playwright.

So the law as it stands today prevents public performance of any copyrighted work (play, book, movie, or other video) without the copyright-holder’s permission.

55 Inch TVs

Believe it or not, the law actually mentions 55-inch TV’s specifically:

if the performance or display is by audiovisual means, any visual portion of the performance or display is communicated by means of a total of not more than 4 audiovisual devices, of which not more than one audiovisual device is located in any 1 room, and no such audiovisual device has a diagonal screen size greater than 55 inches, and any audio portion of the performance or display is communicated by means of a total of not more than 6 loudspeakers, of which not more than 4 loudspeakers are located in any 1 room or adjoining outdoor space;

Source

What is Public Performance?

But the real question is, what is public?

The section of law above only applies to restaurants and bar more than 2000 square feet large:

in the case of an establishment other than a food service or drinking establishment, either the establishment in which the communication occurs has less than 2,000 gross square feet of space (excluding space used for customer parking and for no other purpose), or the establishment in which the communication occurs has 2,000 or more gross square feet of space (excluding space used for customer parking and for no other purpose) and—

So, you’re safe if you’re just hosting a party at home no matter how large your TV is.

Resources

Slashdot article
ArsTechnica article

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