[FC-discuss] Merry Christmas from the IP Police

[Matt Agnello]

Christmas-related infringement was on my mind the other day as well. I  
work at a mall during the day, and I'm regularly bombarded with  
Christmas carols over the PA system -- carols that have been a part of  
my life for as long as I've been alive and that I couldn't really  
think of as anything separate from Christmas.

But I realized that at some point those carols were written and  
produced by someone, probably in the last fifty years, and that they  
were obviously still under copyright. One thing I was curious about  
was the Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer story. That's right next to  
Santa as the heart and soul of the American Christmas Experience. It  
turns out the story and song were created in 1939 by The Rudolph  
Company, and it hasn't passed into the public domain yet, but the song  
and the story are performed across the country, probably daily  
throughout the season, without permission.

If I told someone that Rudolph's story was owned by someone, they'd  
probably laugh at me. The story has been inseparable from Christmas  
and part of the public conscience for my entire life. Imagine what  
would happen if the Rudolph Company tried to actually assert its  
ownership...

It begs the question, when a culture starts to treat a piece of  
material as if it were in the public domain... is it? Should it be?  
Will we start to see "Free Rudolph" the way we saw "Free Mickey Mouse"?

If I make a YouTube video of me singing "Rudolf the Red-Nosed  
Reindeer," should someone be able to stop me?

// Matt

On Dec 10, 2007, at 1:11 AM, Parker Higgins wrote:

> I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and it seems to me like  
> there's been a major uptick in ridiculous public-performance  
> oriented infringement claims.  I think I've got an explanation...
>
> The average person on the street is, I'd guess, a lot more  
> sympathetic to public-performance (and probably, without really  
> thinking about it, wouldn't consider things like royalties for music  
> playing on the PA in a store, or something) than they are to the  
> "distribution" cases that have come up recently.  As a result,  
> public-performance was, in terms of norms, a much less enforced area  
> of copyright law than distribution, which in pre-internet days  
> usually only applied in the case of big time pirates.  Of course,  
> the individual had little or no interaction with copyright law,  
> because it was only the big operations that ran into distribution  
> infringement.
>
> Then, with the advent (Christmas pun? maybe.) of file sharing,  
> distribution claims became much more publicly enforced, most notably  
> with the 20k+ RIAA lawsuits.  I think this began an era of copyright  
> enforcement on the individual, and along with the dubious  
> distribution claims which may or may not have a significant impact  
> on the RIAA's bottom line (and they certainly think it does), came  
> the dubious public-performance claims, which almost certainly do not  
> affect profits.  However, now that it's the content industry's  
> position to prosecute all infringement, including that done by the  
> individual, they've left common sense by the wayside when decided  
> which of these things to go after.
>
> Basically, to summarize, the content industry has started going  
> after the individual in file-sharing cases, and now can't stop.   
> Most of the time, pursuing individual infringement seems ridiculous  
> (hence John Tehranian's recent paper, "Infringement Nation.")
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Parker
>
> On Dec 10, 2007 12:54 AM, Max Berger <bergerm at reed.edu> wrote:
> I'm sure many of you already saw this, but it might be the single most
> ridiculous IP related news item I've ever seen:
>
> Christmas is known world-wide as a time for sharing, a time for  
> giving.
> But for one charity, instead of Santa arriving with gifts, the  
> copyright
> police turned up demanding money. Why? Because the charity allows
> children to sing carols on the premises and their kitchen radio is a
> little loud. You couldn't make it up.
>
> http://torrentfreak.com/charity-forced-to-pay-copyright-police-so-kids-can-sing-071209/
>
>
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