The Lane Hartwell copyright controversy has led to a great deal of debate over the role of copyright and fair use in Internet videos.

Hartwell is a professional photographer that publishes her images on Flickr, with all rights reserved. When she saw one of her photos being used without permission or credit in the video Here Comes Another Bubble, she contacted the video’s creator, Matt Hempey, about getting it removed or having it properly credited.

The video, a cover version of Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start The Fire, is a promo for Hempey’s band, the Richter Scales. Their version has new lyrics about the boom of lame Web 2.0 sites. The video features a string of images, uncredited, that illustrates the growth of these sites.

When Hempey did not respond to Hartwell’s request, she contacted YouTube and asked for the video to be taken down.

Freetards vs Copyright Bullies?

The controversy pits two indie content producers against each other. Hartwell is a freelance photographer that just wants to protect the value of her work because it’s her livelihood. The Richter Scales is just a San Francisco men’s chorus that likes to have some fun.

“Copyright law isn’t really built for resolving disputes between individuals like Lane and TRS,” says LawGeek Jason Schultz. “It’s built for resolving expensive and highly profit-driven disputes between large full-scale commercial entities like movie studios, book publishers, software companies, or search engines — entities with long-standing investments in the copyright system and in-house legal counsel to negotiate issues like licensing.”

Podcasting legal expert Colette Vogele, in the the Podcasting Legal Guide, points out that fair use isn’t cut and dry, and that subjective impressions can make a difference:

Some commentators refer to a “fifth fair use factor” which hinges on good faith — whether your conduct might be considered “morally offensive,” Judges and juries are human, and their decisions can be swayed by whether they think you are a “good or bad” actor.

Because the controversy pits two indie content producers against each other, and because copyright and fair use are often legal gray areas, the issue has polarized discussion among bloggers.

Here are a few of the more interesting takes on the controversy:

• Lane Hartwell says that “When I find someone using my work without my permission, I ask them to remove it or pay a fee. They usually remove it and we are finished. The band did not remove the image from the video when I brought it to their attention and instead they told me they had the right to use it. They could have easily apologized, removed the video from YouTube and re-edited without my image and reposted.”
• Tara Hunt: “I‚Äôm really put off that there are so many people spreading, but also believing, bad rumors in this case. I‚Äôm sure the many men behind the Richter Scales don‚Äôt want a mob sent out to harass a woman whose photograph they used. None of this was done in malice: the photograph used, the request for credit.”
• Derek Powazek: “As more attention is focused on social media, and people become more aware of the value of all that media, this kind of thing is going to come up a lot. It‚Äôs time that we develop some ethical practices for the creation of collaborative media. Simply asking for permission to use someone else‚Äôs work is a good place to start.”
• Matthew Ingram: “I think Ms. Hartwell needs to remember one thing: copyright law wasn‚Äôt designed to give artists or content creators a blunt instrument with which to bash anyone and everyone who uses their work in any form, for any reason. The copyright owner‚Äôs views do not trump everything, and never have.”

Lane Hartwell Image: Laughing Squid

Google today announced a new standard for helping search engines index video, Video Sitemaps.

Video Sitemaps is an extension of the Sitemap Protocol that helps make your videos more searchable via Google Video Search. By submitting this video-specific Sitemap in addition to your standard Sitemap, you can specify all the video files on your site, along with relevant metadata.

Here’s an example:

PC World has released a list of its Biggest Tech Disappointments of 2007, and a lot of them are likely to resonate with anyone involved with new media.

Here’s some of the article’s highlights:

• Amazon Unbox – The interface is cluttered and ugly–lacking both the simplicity and sophistication of the Apple iTunes Store or NetFlix’s Watch Instantly. The selection is weird, and searching is cumbersome. When Unbox debuted in late 2006, we were willing to cut it some slack. After all, we’re talking about Amazon, the guys who put the e in e-commerce. We thought by now they’d have figured out how on-demand video is supposed to work. We were wrong.
• Microsoft’s Zune – We’re not the only ones disappointed in the Zune. According to the NPD Group, Microsoft still lags behind Sandisk and Creative Labs in market share for portable media players. And for every Zune Microsoft sells, Apple sells 30 iPods. Remember: You can’t kill an iPod if you can’t get close to it.
• The Great, The Bad, The Ugly: Apple iPhone – Memo to Apple: It’s time to treat iPhones for what they really are–pocket computers with phone functions built in–and open them up the world. Just a thought.
• Needs To Change Its Spots: Apple “Leopard” OS 10.5 – Maybe we just got spoiled by the iPod and iPhone, but the glow came off Steve Job’s halo after this feline fleabag debuted. Within days of its release last October, Mac users reported dozens of problems with the new OS, some more serious than others. Among the many: Wireless connections that slowly petered away, administrative logins that mysteriously disappeared, and a disturbing tendency to nuke data when moving it between two drives if the connection is interrupted. Worse, a security bug that was fixed in OS 10.4 in March 2006 resurfaced in Leopard, according to Symantec. In mid-November, Apple released an update to Leopard that fixed some of the bugs, including the firewall glitch. Repairing Apple’s reputation, however, may take slightly longer.
• What Is It Good For: The High-Def Format War – Enough already. Did we learn nothing from VHS vs. Betamax, CD-R vs. CD-RW, DVD-A vs. SACD, and so on down the line?¬† At least the warring DVD camps worked out a compromise in the mid-90s that allowed everyone to profit from the new movie format (though it took them a while). Not so in HD land, where a take-no-prisoners attitude on both sides has left consumers cold. It will be a snowy day in Video Hell before we’ll put our money down on either format.
• No Wow, No How: Windows Vista – Five years in the making and this is the best Microsoft could do? It’s not that Vista is awful. It’s just that Vista isn’t all that good. And when the fastest Vista notebook PC World has ever tested is an Apple MacBook Pro, there’s something deeply wrong with the universe. We have no doubt Vista will come to dominate the PC landscape, if only because it will become increasingly hard to buy a new machine that doesn’t have it pre-installed. And that’s disappointing in its own right.

While the PC Week article may seem a little harsh, especially in a year that brought us the iPhone, real competition in the portable media player market and more options for new media than ever, a lot of it still rings true.

The iPhone is fantastic, but people want it to be a platform, not an appliance. Apple has said that it will address this issue in 2008. Vista was not an option for a lot of people, and the latest version of OS X, Leopard, had some serious problems. Apple has updated Leopard, but it was released too soon.

The Zune in 2007 is a great improvement over the Zune in 2006, aka the Zunetanic.¬† The problem with the Zune is that its basic feature set is still inferior to the iPod’s and the innovations that it offers just aren’t that useful.

When it comes to HD, it’s starting to look like the format wars may make HD players irrelevant. We’re already getting HD directly from the Internet to our TV, though not from Amazon Unbox – we just need more options for content.

They Might Be Giants have introduced a new podcast for kids, TMBG’s Friday Night Video Podcast For Kids.
You can preview the podcast below.
To subscribe, add this feed URL to your podcast client:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/theymightbegiants/

via Wired

Photographer Lane Hartwell is tired of people stealing her photos and reusing them without her permission.

She’s published her images, like a lot of us, on Flickr, with all rights reserved. Unlike most of us, though, Hartwell is a freelance photographer and a regular contributor to Wired News. Her work has featured in publications around the world.

So, when she saw one of her photos being used without permission or credit in the video Here Comes Another Bubble, she contacted the video’s creator, Matt Hempey, about it.

The video, a cover version of Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start The Fire, is a promo for Hempey’s band, the Richter Scales. Their version has new lyrics about the boom of lame Web 2.0 sites. The video features a string of images, uncredited, that illustrates the growth of these sites.

When Hempey did not respond to Hartwell’s request, she contacted YouTube and asked for the video to be taken down.

Parody Or Piracy?

Some consider the video to be hilarious. But Hartwell isn’t laughing.

“It‚Äôs extremely frustrating to me that my work keeps getting stolen,” says Hartwell. “I feel like a broken record‚Ķhaving to explain why it‚Äôs not okay to just take an image because you like it or want it. I work hard at what I do and want to be paid, period.”

Hartwell’s action, and a Wired article that told her story, has triggered an eruption of discussion in the blogosphere. Many of the responses have been negative, with some going so far as dragging Hartwell’s name through the dirt.

At TechCrunch, Mike Arrington says that Hartwell is a bully that misunderstands copyright, that she ruined everyone’s fun and that the people that support her are “a mob”.

Arrington says the real issue here isn’t copyright, it isn’t about getting paid for your work, it’s that “Hartwell‚Äôs feelings were hurt.”

“Once again, a perversion of copyright is being used to destroy art!” says Arrington.

Ali Shafeya Al-Moussawi, a special correspondent for the Alive In Baghdad video podcast, was killed on December 14th, 2007.

Here’s the news from the AIB site:

On Friday the 14th at 11:30pm Baghdad time, Iraqi National Guard forces raided the street where Ali’s house is, one of the neighbors heard a gun firing after 15 minutes from the arrival of the Iraqi National Guard convoy to the street, the force left at 3:00am. His neighbors kept calling Ali’s phone and it was switched off all the time, so they called his cousin Amar because he lives one block away from where Ali lives.

Amar arrived in Ali’s house and found Ali shoot dead in the living room, Amar called the Iraqi Police and told them the story as he heard it from Ali’s neighbors. At 8:30 am Baghdad time the Iraqi Police took Ali’s body to the morgue, his two uncles received the body at 10:00am and they headed to Najaf to bury him.

Amar said the neighbor who lives in the front of his house was shot dead too during that raid, the guy’s name is Hussein and he is 26 years old. He was in his place along with his brother and nephew. The brother and the nephew disappeared after the convoy left.

The morgue report says that Ali took 31 bullets between the chest and the head and died immediately. He will be missed and remembered. His two brothers were killed in the Firdos Square bombing in 2005. He is survived by his mother and sister. As written above, we are collecting donations for his family via Paypal and mail at smallworldnews (at) gmail.com No amount is too small, and anything will be appreciated.

Alive in Baghdad is an award-winning video podcast about daily life in Iraq. Through the work of a team of Americans and Iraqi correspondents on the ground, the video podcast shows the conflict through the voices of Iraqis.

Alive In Baghdad is collecting donations for the funeral and his family. You can make a donation via Paypal to smallworldnews (at) gmail.com.

via JD

We thought that our 2007 Holiday Guide to iCrap was pretty comprehensive, what with the iPod Tooth Whitener and all.

Well, looks like we were wrong:

The iPond is a tiny fish tank that doubles as a music speaker.

Unfortunately, it’s a tiny fish tank that is about 15 times smaller than the recommended tank size for the fish it holds. The tank’s water capacity is only 650 millilitres once rocks are placed in it.

And the fish get to vibrate along to the music, courtesy of the cheap speaker built into the iPond.

The RSPCA has called on the device to be banned because it is too small to provide fish with adequate oxygen supplies and a clean environment.

Animal Liberation Victoria’s Noah Mark said he was disgusted by the invention. “The fish in this thing does not look like it has very long to live and it can barely move,” he said. “Even if it does live it’s not [a] life worth living … it’s really just a torture box.”

Apple quietly introduced an update to Garageband that adds a cool new feature: iPhone ringtone creation. Anything you’ve got in Garageband, you can turn into a ringtone.

For some people, that may mean the end of getting double-charged for ringtones at iTunes. If you’re a musician or if you’ve got a podcast, though, you might want to create ringtones to promote your song or show. You could do this with your music, a show theme, sound effects or a catchphrase.

Here’s what you need:

• GarageBand 4.1.1 or later
• iTunes 7.5 or later
• iPhone with software version 1.1.2 or later

Here’s a step-by-step guide to creating ringtones with Garageband:

The holidays are upon us, and you know what that means; it’s time for the second annual Podcasting News Guide to iCrap.

There are a lot of great iPod accessories you can buy. You can get iPod cases, audio recorders, FM transmitters and all sorts of other useful iPod gear to help you make the most out of your new media lifestyle.

This guide doesn’t include any of that stuff.

The Podcasting News Guide to iCrap is a comprehensive guide to all the completely asinine iPod accessories you can buy. More importantly, it’s a comprehensive guide to the completely asinine iPod accessories that people can buy you.

Take our advice, share this guide with your loved ones, associates, Twitter pals, Facebook friends and Digg’ers. Let them know that, if it appears on this page, you don’t want it!

It may not help you get what you want for the holidays, but at least you won’t get any iCrap.

The Podcasting News Guide to iCrap

Last year, we warned you about the ten worst iPod-related Christmast presents ever, including:

• $250 iPod jeans;
• The iCarta iPod toilet paper dispenser;
• iPod boxers, iPod panties and even an iPod bra; and
• An iPod vibrator for two.

After last year’s load of iCrap, we were sure that we’d never see iPod accessories that were more idiotic. We were sure we’d never see iPod accessories that were more useless.

We were wrong.

Let’s start with this gem:

Rock My Teeth – The Next Generation In Tooth Whitening

Want a clean, healthy smile, but don’t want to hassle with mainstream tooth-whitening solutions that are proven to be safe and effective?

If so, then Professor Bocelli’s Rock My Teeth may be what you’ve been waiting for! It lets you “whiten your teeth with music!”

A custom cable, right, with ear phones and tray jack works with your iPod or other digital music player. The device lets you control how much sound goes to your teeth and how much goes to your ears.

You can even turn up the music to your teeth and turn down the music to your ears during treatments, to truly Rock Your Teeth. According to Bocelli, the louder the music to your teeth, the more whitening energy you provide!

Think the iCrap can’t get any worse than that?

Think again – we’re just getting started.

Today, Helio announced a new mobilecasting service that they are calling “the most comprehensive YouTube experience currently offered on mobile!”

They could have thrown a “massive” or “global” into that, but the service is exactly the type of thing we’ve been pushing for for years: mobile devices that are sophisticated two-way Web publishing platforms.

Available for Helio Ocean users at no additional charge and running over a nationwide high-speed 3G network, Helio’s custom YouTube application features integrated video capture and upload for near real-time sharing of experiences, GPS tagging of videos, personalization and access to community features like rating and commenting on videos.

“Helio has taken the mobile YouTube experience to the next level,” said Chad Hurley, CEO and co-founder, YouTube. “This innovative application offers people even more customization and provides them with instant access to interact with the YouTube community whenever and wherever they go.”