The only reason I took a copyright course in law school was to (try) to understand the rules behind sampling in music. While technology today has opened ever-wider avenues for expression through sampling, remixes or mash-ups, copyright law has remained confused in its dimensions and often ham-handed in its application. Larry Lessig has a terrific post on the excesses of copyright law ” especially as applied to amateurs expressing themselves and some ideas on how to improve things (Lessig is a professor at Stanford, and colleague of Avvo advisor Deborah Rhode).

One change I keep expecting to see is some realization by corporate copyright owners that the scorched earth policy toward copyright enforcement is seriously counter-productive. No legal benefit, no economic benefit, and a big PR black eye for acting like a bully. I’d like to see more copyright owners embrace the enthusiastic use of their output by amateurs; instead we get Universal insisting that a dancing baby video be removed from YouTube.

Is this more evidence for why corporations shoudn’t let their lawyers run things? No sane business manager, marketer or PR person would go after a grainy, 29-second video of a baby dancing to a Prince song, right? Ironically, the dancing baby himself may be the one to get the aggressive copyright lawyers in line, as his case looks like it will end up embodying a requirement that copyright holders consider fair use before firing off their legal missives.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 at 10:43 am by Josh King, VP of Business Development and General Counsel and is filed under Josh King Posts, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.