December 07, 2004

7 Years after The Distorted Barbie, now there is talk of a legal defense fund. The question is, should it be only for bloggers?
by Liza Sabater

Jason's Kottke gets sued by Sony for posting spoliers, audio clips, and transcripts of Ken Jenning loss at Jeopardy. Overnight bloggers around the world discover Chilling Effects.

Sigh.

This happened to Napier about 7 years ago with The Distorted Barbie. It was probably one of the first cases of a big company threating a web site owner under trademark and copyright infringement laws. The case was so new that there were no lawyers at the time who could really handle the case with any real expertise. I think that Wendy Seltzer had not even created the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse project. I seem to remember her telling me she had studied the case in Harvard. (Now I'll have to make a note to ask her.)

So now one of the big guns of the blogosphere gets C&D'd and the blogeratti get their panties in a bunch. Yes, the initial intentions of BuzzMachine... by Jeff Jarvis | Bloggers' Legal Defense Society seem good, but it's just too ghetto --and in a bad way. Why a legal defense fund just for bloggers.

Why not talk about helping the Electronic Frontier Foundation, raise money for all legal challenges involving electronic media, whether it is blogs, music or, yes! dare I say NET ART. Sometime during Copyleft, Right and Center: Innovations in Law - OpenLaw, Chilling Effects, Creative Commons, which happened last year at Eyebeam, I briefly asked Lawrence Lessig about exactly that : Why didn't Creative Commons create a legal defense fund for copyright challenges? His reply was that Creative Commons was more interested at the time in setting standards in licensing and contracts, more so that in taking up legal cases. Also, that kind of initiative really entails a whole set of rules, regulations and administrative issues they just did not have the staff for.

I say that, instead of pulling out of thin air a legal defense fund, the more responsible thing would be to bring Creative Commons, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Rhizome, Eyebeam and, brace yourselves, the ACLU into this project. Why? Because as Seltzer has already stated here, these trademark and copyright infringement lawsuits are attacks against freedom of speech that affect all digital cultural creatives.

So I'm in, and I'd be more than happy to volunteer in this effort as long as it would cover at the very least all online cultural creatives.

About The Distorted Barbie:
What are some examples of copyright actions agains...? -- Chilling Effects Clearinghouse
Wired News: Mattel's Latest: Cease-and-Desist Barbie
(May I just take this moment to just worship the ground Douglass Bowman walks on? I just went to look for the Wired article and not only was it there but, this 1997 page has not "aged" at all, thanks to the web development and design genius of Doug and Stopdesign. Bravo!)

Elsewhere in the blogosphere:
Bloggers Boycott Sony - The Jason Calacanis Weblog - calacanis.weblogsinc.com
Micro Persuasion: Sony TV Legal Contacts Popular Blogger
The Media Drop: Jason Kottke's blogging concerns
Anil Dash: Sony TV: Bigger Losers Than Ken Jennings
Weblogsky: Legal Aid for Bloggers

Posted by Liza Sabater in Activism, Art, Blogeratti, Blogs, Censorship, Civil Rights, Copyright, Creative Class, Fair Use, Intellectual Property, Internet, Law, Politics, Publishing, Technology, Trademark, Web
Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (1) | Technorati Cosmos

Trackbacks

Trackback for this post:
http://www.culturekitchen.com/cgi-bin/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/2627

The following blogs make reference to this post :

» Sony and Kottke from Ad Astra Per Aspera
About a few months back in September, Jason Kottke posted information about Ken Jennings' loss on Jeopardy, and on the 28th of November he posted an audio clip of Ken Jennings' loss (of which the episode aired two days later). Sony contacted him and ... [More...]

Found inDecember 26, 2004 04:09 AM

Say it loud, say it proud!