1: Wedding Photo Damages for Madonna

First off today, Madonna has scored a big win in one of the most bizarre copyright cases recently. She sued The Mail, a UK newspaper, after they published photographs from her wedding allegedly obtained by a former interior designer of hers who used the access to her house to make copies of some of her wedding album photos.

The wedding had been an extremely private affair, with no previously published images. The photos in The Mail were published a few days after the couple had filed for divorce.

The case raised an interesting copyright question as, usually, the photographer is the copyright holder, not the subject. However, it appears the photos were taken by a close friend of the couple who assigned all rights to them.

Madonna has agreed to give a significant portion of the undisclosed damages to her Malawi charity.

2: Guns N’ Roses Sued for Copyright Infringement

Electronic musician Ulrich Schnauss has filed suit against the band Guns N’ Roses claiming that the band sampled two of his songs. He is demanding $1 million in damages and for the “Chinese Democracy” album to be pulled from the shelves.

According to attorneys, Guns N’ Roses track “Riad N’ the Bedouins” samples both Shnauss’ 2001 “Wherever You Are” and 2003 “A Strangely Isolated Place”.

Schnauss, though popular in Germany, is lesser-known in the U.S. and is a stark contrast to GNR, with moodier music and lyrics.

The case is ongoing.

3: A Harvard Skirmish in the Copyright Wars

Finally today, copyright seems to turn up in the strangest places these days but this is one even I didn’t expect, a college notebook.

Andrew Magliozzi, a Harvard student and son of Car Talk host Ray Magliozzi, started up a not-for-profit site where students post notes from their lectures for others to review. However, he’s been notified by Harvard lawyers that his site might run afoul of copyright law as professor’s have copyright in their lectures so long as they were first fixed into a tangible medium and the notes may be a copyright violation. No one, however, has threatened or sued him.

It’s an interesting area of the law and the article above highlights some of the conflicting ways that schools have handled this issue. Some have encouraged professors to grant an explicit “note taking” license while others, such as Harvard, have used it was a tool to close up access to their classes.

It is an interesting article on a difficult topic. Clearly though, this is an area where legal solutions alone are not going to work.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today. We will be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

Want the Full Story?

Tune in every Saturday morning for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Monday morning right here on Plagiarism Today.

We also have updates to several cases including Madonna’s new album, the Irate Gamer gets parodied and Hulu comes back to YouTube.

Finally, in weird copyright news, there is a debate about whether or not PostSecret is having their rights violated by NBC, visual evidence why Linux is cooler than Windows and conclusive proof that there is no honor among thieves.

Remember, as usual, this week’s linkroll is a “raw” link list. Some stories are duplicated, some do not point to their original sources and some may not be accurate. A great deal of refining goes into producing the show notes for the Copyright 2.0 Show.

Finally, there was an issue with the feed for this site over the past week. For those of you that are getting this entry along with the previous five or more, I apologize. There is a bug in WordPress 2.5 that causes the feed to break when a site uses fancy permalinks. The fix is easy, but it has to be done by hand. For more information, see this link on the WordPress Forums.

The feed should function normally now. Thank you for your patience.

All in all, there were fifteen stories this week including news from all over the copyright world, even including an update on Yoko Ono, an appearance on Rush Limbaugh and much, much more.

So, to help me sense of it all, I sat down with Chris Matthieu from Numly and we tore through the week’s copyright happenings with our usual mix of news, views and abuse.

This week’s stories include:

• Orphan works Legislation Introduced
• Microsoft Wipes DRM Keys
• Metallica and Madonna both sound like Trent Reznor, Who Releases a New Single
• BayTSP to Track YouTube Piracy
• Capcom Has Egg on its Face After Okami Release
• And Many more…

You can download the MP3 file here (direct download). Those interested in subscribing to the show can do so via this feed.

You can find the “Sue All of the World” Music video mentioned in the Podcast on Camp Chaos (Warning: Some language)

Let us know what you think of the interview segment and if we should do more of these in the future!

Show Notes

[audio:http://media.libsyn.com/media/plagiarismtoday/copyright20eps56.mp3]

All totaled, the show had eighteen stories, including the following:

• Thomas Plans to Appeal her Verdict
• More Artists Abandon their Labels
• Mechanics Get Sued for Listening to Radios
• The Pirates Board an Enemy Site
• Techcrunch Gets Some Outrageous Copyright Threats
• And Many more…

You can download the MP3 file here. Those interested in subscribing to the show can do so via this feed.

New this week, I am using Divshare to host the MP3 files for the show. You can embed the player below into your site by clicking on the bracket symbol or just listen to it live here as always. Also, you can download or listen to past episodes of the show by visiting the Copyright 2.0 Show folder (Note: I am uploading the files now, may be later today before they all make it up.)

Still Very Neat! Show Notes