The fan fiction discussion is now available as a mp3 file here. I come in near the end, about 3/4 of the way through. It was an interesting discussion, though I wish we'd gotten to talk more about post-Star Trek developments, particularly shows and movies that do have strong central female characters.

Still hoping for an archived source for the Open Source radio show, which was quite interesting -- we spent more time on Star Trek fandom than I'd hoped for, but I have forgotten what it's like to introduce an audience to the subject, and Star Trek is always a helpful way in. One thing I wished I'd gotten to say about Lee Goldberg's position that fan fiction shows disrespect for creators' intellectual property -- he compared it to another person giving "your children" "attitudes you never intended or wanted." Which to me sounds a lot like raising a real child -- they come from us, but they aren't us, which is alternately a source of joy and despair. I'm going to be writing a piece for a book on IP and gender about the "work as child" metaphor. What fascinates me is that the metaphor has persisted and still seems persuasive to many even as the persuasiveness of the original claim to ownership of one's children has faded. It takes a village to raise a child; it takes an interpretive community to create a text.

Naomi Novik and Francesca Coppa, two very smart women, will be talking about fan fiction on Open Source Radio tonight from 7-8, as noted here. You can stream the show, which is a live, call-in show, here. The call-in number is (877) 673-6767. I am supposed to do a portion of the show sometime after the halfway mark, focusing on legal issues; anti-fan fiction writer Lee Goldberg is also supposed to participate.

You can be a Jedi or a Sith in the Star Wars online game, but you can't make music because of copyright concerns. So you can play a musician character, but only perform a few pieces of music. Sounds like a pretty boring job.

I'm not really sure why LucasArts and Sony Online wouldn't qualify as ISPs and therefore be able to avoid infringement liability through standard DMCA models. Allowing people to play individual notes, which they could in theory turn into infringing performances, seems a lot like allowing people to type individual letters, which they could in theory use to retell The Da Vinci Code in the game, the same way that performance artists recreated an episode of "Friends" in Quake. Am I missing something?

As a side note, I read this story because I personalized my Google page. I'm trying to figure out how Google changes the way schools and libraries should think about information provision, and how copyright law will influence or inhibit those changes. The basic question for me is, in a world where every hard drive is a library, what should the law say about libraries as distinct from other entities? (As Theodore Sturgeon asked: If all men were brothers, would you let one marry your sister?)

Salon writes about a book on my wishlist, "Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture." As I pointed out in Copy This Essay (PDF), mix tapes are creative, expressive endeavors made out of other people's creative endeavors. As Salon says, "the mix taper faces the same choices as the writer: what to include, what to exclude, where to start, where to end, what to emphasize and what to hide between the lines. Besides, for a large part of an entire generation, a good mix tape carries more emotion and potential for transport than any book, film or individual song."

Incidentally, tushnet.com has finally, finally been updated, including full-text versions of my publications.

Google Gulp: The FAQ for Google's April 1st product suggests that Google is maybe a little sensitive about privacy and other issues raised by a market leader introducing new products.

Signal/Noise 2k5: I will be at this conference, April 8, 2005, and I think it will be great.
According to the text they sent me, "The conference offers an exciting mix of performances, demonstrations and discussions examining how digital technologies are enabling new forms of creativity by a broader group of people. Cultural, business, legal and ethical implications of new genres and new forms of authorship will all be covered." I was invited for my work on fan fiction.

The conference is hosted by Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and registration is extremely cheap - $10 for students and $20 for nonstudents. My awesome friend Naomi Novik will be there too. Her bio:

"Author of the fantasy series TEMERAIRE, coming in Spring 2006 from Del Rey and Harper Collins UK, Naomi Novik has been writing fanfiction for more than a decade. She is also the founder and organizer of Vividcon, the annual convention for digital video enthusiasts who create music videos and other short films based on their favorite television shows and movies, and of the Commonverse, a project dedicated to applying the "open source" approach for software development to the writing of commercial shared-universe fiction."

Music videos made by soldiers in Iraq: The article discusses the legality of showing dead Iraqis under the Geneva Convention, but not the legality of using Incubus etc. as the soundtrack for the videos.

Doctor Batman: I just told my students about various trademarks that have been used as baby names in the US, including a bevy of Timberlands, Chanels, Camrys, and two -- count 'em, two -- ESPNs. It's nice to know Americans aren't the only ones who are this wacky, though this fellow has done it to himself rather than to a defenseless child.

Curiously High-Tech Hacks for a Classic Tin: Another fascinating trademark reuse problem. Altoids seems perfectly happy with all the aftermarket variations on its tins, enough so to plan a website of its own showing how the tins can be used. I wonder what happens to the unauthorized versions then? I also wonder what Apple thinks about calling mp3 players in Altoids tins "iTins." Of course, Apple has tolerated a lot of iPod-related things, from Playboy's iBod to iPodmyphoto.com. It's a risk Apple ran when it picked the "i" suffix for its Internet-related product.

United Church of Christ News Release: SpongeBob welcomed by UCC: Is Spongebob being used in commerce? What defenses, if any, would UCC have to an infringement or dilution claim? Of course, one might think Spongebob's owners would be grateful for the good press.

Copyright in the Digital Workspace, a report available from the Copyright Clearance Center, has a checklist at the end suggesting why companies might want a "copyright compliance solution," naturally one provided by the CCC. I was especially amused by question 11, "Does your company advocate a culture of openness, sharing and the free flow of information and ideas?" If that's true, or if you depend on product or service innovation to maintain or grow market share (Q1) or you might have a few disgruntled employees lurking in the background (Q4), the CCC is there for you.

The report suggests that businesspeople generally know that copyright is an issue that's out there, but think that their own activities -- forwarding articles to interested people, usually -- are not problematic. And, especially when they're forwarding links or articles on the web (the report doesn't seem to distinguish these two activities, which are functionally the same during the period that the articles are freely available on the web), it doesn't seem problematic to me either. But I'm not the CCC.

Copy This Essay is out!

Whereas the City of Heroes dispute involves a company making a product that consumers can use to emulate trademarked characters, iPod My Photo seems a lot more straightforward from the trademark perspective: the company transforms a consumer's picture into something that looks like an iPod ad. See larger samples here. The company is, for profit, emulating the distinctive iPod ads, including the image of the iPod (though a consumer can say "no," the default is "draw the subject(s) wearing an iPod"). Seems like something that might cause post-sale confusion about whether Apple authorized the images -- and it seems like something Apple might want to monetize itself, if it's so darn popular that people will pay to advertise not just the iPod, but the ad style itself.

It's almost incidental that the site uses "iPod" as a verb, which is supposedly a trademark no-no. In the past, using a trademark as a verb might have helped slide it into genericity, but in these IP-savvy days I doubt it makes any difference. We all know that "Xerox" and "Google" are trademarks, even as we instruct others to xerox and google in appropriate contexts. (The verbs "iPod," "xerox," and "google" are examples of zero derivation, in which a word is made to play a different part of speech without any suffix or other marker such as "-ize." English, that most flexible of languages, never ceases to amaze me with its adaptability.)

That being said, the site's pretty cool; I wouldn't turn down an iPodized picture of myself, or maybe my cat -- the cat sample picture looks good.

I can sympathize with this Onion article: Son, We Need To Talk About This Supreme Court Obsession Of Yours.

I got myself in some hot water last year when I referred students to an Onion article about a successful trademark suit filed by a tanning salon against Tanzania, which ended with a preliminary injunction against the nation's use of its name. Several of my foreign students -- rationally enough, really, given how wacky US law can be -- thought it might be true because I didn't explain that the Onion is parody. The story is now pay-only on the Onion's site, but a blog report -- including some comments that took the "news" seriously -- can be found here.