But instead of helping indie Scittish musician Edwyn Collins, a corporation with absolutely no claim to Edwyn’s work was able to step in and prevent Mr Collins from distributing his own work online simply by making the spurious claim that it owned his music.
Edwyn Collins never gave up control over the copyright to his own music. As an Indie musician he had established a MySpace page where he was making his music available for his fans to download.
Or at least he was until an erroneous take-down order claiming Mr Collins was infringing its copyright caused MySpace to take down Edwyn’s music, preventing him from sharing his hit song, A Girl Like You.
Yet Edwyn Collins was the copyrights holder, the record company was not. Because of the traditional power invested in the major recording companies, MySpace did what they were told by the record company, despite the fact the record company had no legitimate claim to Edwyn’s music. (One of the bad things about the DMCA; no proof is required.)
Edwyn Collins had to fight to get the right to put his own music on his own MySpace page.
“[We are] aware of who the biggest bootleggers are … It’s not the filesharers.”
In 2013 I discovered Canadian writer Cory Doctorow was facing the same problem. Doctorow is a best selling novelist who self identifies as a copyfighter, or perhaps “the” copyfighter. Most of his work is released under Creative Commons licenses, yet Torrent Freak reported that the digital downloads he’s made legally available online are being hit by spurious take down notices. Clearly copyright law is interfering with the writer’s ability to distribute his own work in the manner of his own choosing.
“My Creative Commons licensed 2013 novel Homeland, the sequel to my 2008 novel Little Brother, spent four weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and got great reviews around the country. But Fox apparently hasn’t heard of it — or doesn’t care. They’ve been sending takedown notices to Google (and possibly other sites), demanding that links to legally shared copies of the book be removed.
These notices, sent under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, require that the person who signs them swears, on pain of perjury, that they have a good faith basis to assert that they represent the rightsholder to the work in question. So Fox has been swearing solemn, legally binding oaths to the effect that it is the rightsholder to a file called, for example, “Cory Doctorow Homeland novel.”
It’s clear that Fox is mistaking these files for episodes of the TV show “Homeland.” What’s not clear is why or how anyone sending a censorship request could be so sloppy, careless and indifferent to the rights of others that they could get it so utterly wrong. I have made inquiries about the possible legal avenues for addressing this with Fox, but I’m not optimistic. The DMCA makes it easy to carelessly censor the Internet, and makes it hard to get redress for this kind of perjurious, depraved indifference.
As long as copyright law enables large corporations to suppress the distribution of creative works they have no claim to, the ability of independent self publishing authors, musicians, and film makers to make a living from their own creative works will continue to be at risk.
David Bowie gave permission to Canadian Commander Chris Hadfield to use his song, Space Oddity on board the International Space Station. It was a big success, and Bowie publicly praised it.
But like most music artists starting out, David Bowie had assigned his copyright to the record label, who still controlled it despite the fact Mr Bowie had created the song. As a result, Mr Bowie had to ask the label for clearance before he could give Commander Chris Hadfield permission to use it.
As it turns out, the record label did grant Commander Hadfield permission, but only for one year. When the year was up, the label promptly took down Commander Hadfield’s YouTube video as a copyright infringement.
The resulting outcry and anger was directed at David Bowie, even though none of it was his fault. But most people have little or no understanding of how copyright law actually works.
David Bowie went back to the label to ask for an extension to get the Hadfield’s video restored to YouTube.
