Someone Who Is About To Be Fired At Warner Music Issues DMCA Takedown On Larry Lessig Presentation
Last night, Larry Lessig tweeted that Warner Music had sent a takedown notice to YouTube over one of his presentations, claiming that it infringed their copyright. Lessig, of course, is one of the nation's leading legal scholars, particularly when it comes to fair use and electronic media. His presentations are filled with examples of companies like Warner sending bogus takedowns over fair-use inclusion of their copyrights in YouTube videos. And there's a burgeoning body of law that affords stiff penalties to companies that send these bogus takedowns.
If there were anyone out there to whom you would not want to send a random takedown notice for an online video, it would probably be Larry Lessig. Given that Lessig has become the public face for those who feel that copyright has been stretched too far, as well as being a founder of Stanford's Fair Use Project, and who's written multiple books on these issues, you would think (just maybe) that any copyright holder would at least think twice before sending a DMCA takedown on a Larry Lessig presentation.
Apparently, you'd be wrong.
Lessig, of course, is a lawyer, and a big supporter of fair use, so it's no surprise that he's also said he's going to be fighting this.
The thing that I can't understand is who at Warner Music would decide this was a good idea? We've seen Warner make a number of 
highly questionable moves over the past six months, but this may be the most incomprehensible. Warner Music may claim it was an accident or that it didn't mean to send the takedown, but that's hard to fathom as well. The DMCA rules are pretty clear, that the filer needs to clearly own the content, and previously lawsuits have said they need to take fair use into account. I'm going to make a BIG bowl of popcorn to watch as Warner Music gets pwned.
Update: Some people have been asking which Lessig presentation was taken down. It's been reposted elsewhere, so you can check it out, and then explain how Warner Music has any claim to a takedown.
XKCD Gets A Book Deal
From the New York Times:
Randall Munroe, creator of the popular Internet comic strip xkcd, plans to venture forth from his playpen filled with plastic balls to publish an actual book.
When Pixels Find New Life on Real Paper
By NOAM COHEN
IT’S not exactly Quentin Tarantino directing Ibsen, or Jeff Gordon racing go-carts, but the idea that Randall Munroe, creator of the online comic strip xkcd — wildly popular among techies the world over for its witty use of programming code in its gags — would for the first time publish a book is still something of a head scratcher.
Not a book for Kindle, I should add. A print book — you know, dead trees, ink, no text search, nonadjustable font size. The plan is for an initial press run of 10,000 copies sometime around June. And judging by the enthusiasm of the strip’s fans, who frequently act out the concepts in the strip in real life, those copies should sell quickly.
So, are we seeing an all-too-rare example of the triumph of print books over digital content? Does even an online legend like the 24-year-old Mr. Munroe crave the respectability of print? (Mr. Munroe once before climbed the respectability ladder when in October he competed against the illustrator Farley Katz of The New Yorker in a “cartoon-off.” No winner was declared.)
In fact, the xkcd story previews the much more likely future of books in which they are prized as artifacts, not as mechanisms for delivering written material to readers. This is print book as vinyl record — admired for its look and feel, its cover art, and relative permanence — but not so much for convenience.
The print xkcd book is not being published through a traditional company but rather by breadpig — which was created by Alexis Ohanian, one of the founders of the social-news Web site reddit. The site has sold high-concept merchandise like refrigerator magnets or T-shirts, but never a book. (Its profits go to the charity Room to Read.)
“We never made any projection — 10,000 seems like a good run,” Mr. Ohanian said, adding that this lack of research “is laughable from the perspective of anyone who knows the book industry. It’s what makes sense.”
The book — with the working title “xkcd,” though Mr. Ohanian says it may carry a subtitle like “a book of romance, sarcasm, math and language” — will not initially be sold in bookstores, and probably never in the big chains. Instead, it will be sold through the xkcd Web site.
“It doesn’t need to be in bookstores,” Mr. Munroe said. “I don’t have hard numbers about this, but the impression I get is that the amount of eyeballs you get from being on the humor shelf at Barnes & Noble — it is almost insignificant.”
Mr. Munroe said he had been contacted by large publishers, particularly those that specialize in comics and graphic novels. “The traditional model is they send us a royalty, and they handle getting it sold,” he said. “We figure that most of our audience is people who know us from the Internet — normal publishers weren’t as interested.”
Naturally, without an established publisher and with a devoted fan base online, the book will not be promoted through traditional publicity. Rather, the plan is to rely on word-of-keyboard.
Such online recommendations, Mr. Ohanian said, were how he discovered xkcd. “The first time xkcd showed up on reddit — it was just good,” he said. “The Internet really facilitates good stuff being read.”
Will there be review copies sent to newspapers and magazines? Good question, Mr. Ohanian said. There’s no reason why not, he quickly concluded.
While Mr. Munroe conceded a nostalgic love of books, remembering how he devoured books of a favorite comic strip, Calvin & Hobbes, he said he is now a committed Kindle 2 user, preferring it to print. Still, he said: “I have this urge. You want to print them out and put them up on places. There is something good about collecting them together.”
Publishing a book is an extension of the selling of items like T-shirts and posters, which pays the bills, he said, to a “free culture” mind-set about the cartoons themselves. “We have been encouraging people to share things, saying that it is a good business decision,” he said. “Instead of trying to convince people, why not make a bunch of money?”
The book will have 150 to 200 of strips out of more than 500 so far published online and is expected to sell for $19. The selection was made by a fan who is also doing the layout for breadpig. “I took a few off and added a few others,” he said.
The book will include a foreward from Mr. Munroe as well as red-ink commentary from him on the most popular strips. One trick in transferring the material from online to print has been how to recreate the “title text” that comments on the strip when your cursor hovers over it.
“It’s not supposed to be a punch line, but hopefully if you didn’t laugh, you’ll laugh at this,” he said. The title text will appear where the tiny copyright notice would appear on a traditional strip.
Does that mean that the book won’t carry a traditional copyright and instead take its lead from the online comic strip itself, which Mr. Munroe licenses under Creative Commons, allowing noncommercial re-use as long as credit is given?
“To anyone who wants to photocopy, bind, and give a copy of the book to their loved one — more power to them,” he said. “He/She will likely be disappointed that you’re so cheap, though.”
