When Oliver Stone's World Trade Center is released this summer, some people may do a double take. Those people might even imagine that they've already seen the film and decide to watch Superman Returns one more time. At least that's what lawyers for Paramount Pictures claim in a recent suit against Chris Moukarbel, creator of a 12-minute short based on a bootlegged copy of the Stone movie's script. Moukarbel, a recent film school grad, made his film with student actors and released it for free on the Internet.

Why'd Moukarbel make the film? He's an artist whose work focuses on "memorial [...] and the way in which political events are edified." Oliver Stone, with his penchant for historicization and forthcoming would-be blockbuster about the most traumatic event in recent American history, seems like a perfect muse. And looking at it through the lens of a case like Campbell v. Acuff Rose (the 2 Live Crew v. Roy Orbison case), it's probably legal. Of the four elements reviewed in that seminal decision regarding fair use, Moukarbel's work is less commercial than 2 Live Crew's, but it sounds like he changed less of the orginal work. Silencing non-commercial commentary on a matter of public concern? That ain't what copyright is for.

Visually, Google.com is very plain. It has acres of whitespace and none of the flashing, blinky bits that make me want to browse the web with Lynx. The only piece of ornamentation is the Google logo, which is occasionally reworked into whimsical variations to honor special events. Known as "Google doodles," these versions mark special days like Thanksgiving, the Persian New Year, and the birthdays of people who Google employees admire.

But the family of Joan Miró (b. April 20, 1893-1983), the Catalan surrealist painter, wasn't pleased when Google honored his birthday with a Google doodle incorporating elements of his work. Google took down the logo at the request of the "Artists Rights Society, a group that represents the Miró family and more than 40,000 visual artists and their estates." According to their representative, "the authorization process is simple: all Google needed to do was send an e-mail asking permission to use the images. [...] We would have asked the estate or the family, and they would have said yes or no."

If they said no, the reasoning goes, Google shouldn't be allowed to make a Miró homage. But at what point can we stop asking permission to comment on the world around us, including the art that is part of that world?

What do you think? Should it be illegal to make a noncommercial collage designed to honor an artist? Would it be different if the collage was made by an art critic who wanted to draw attention to formal elements in several different Miró paintings? Are those uses different from, say, Poster.com printing entire copyrighted Miró paintings and selling them?

I don't know if the Artists Rights Society threatened to sue, but their letter certainly assumes that they should have the right to do so. And so this episode underscores an inevitable outcome of permission-based culture: creativity cannot travel in a direct line from idea to artistic expression to the public -- it takes a detour through the land of negotiation, where it can be waylaid by lawyers and the fear of lawsuits.

20 year-old Yan Yifan stole and sold the login credentials of 30 gamers, and a Chinese judge has upheld his 5000 RMB ($870) fine. In its decision, the court said that "online game players had spent time, energy and money gaining the game's equipment and adding value to the virtual goods." The article goes on to say that others in China have been calling for explicit legal protections for this kind of "virtual property."

This is interesting because it's the same kind of theoretical justification for copyright in things like databases: no creativity required, just hard work. The tension between creativity and this "sweat of the brow" approach is discussed in this paper, and traces of both are evident in the patois of copyright, but neither encompasses the utilitarian justifications provided by the US Constitution. There, neither creativity nor hard work are sufficient to justify copyright protection. Instead, the Constitution says that protection is granted in order to promote the creation of new works. In case you were wondering.

The Smithsonian Institution, the publicly funded entity that manages some of America's largest archives and most venerable museums, has entered into a semi-exclusive agreement with Showtime for documentaries that rely on their material. Under the arrangement, Showtime will have a "right of first refusal" for works that use Smithsonian resources, including public domain material and expert interviews. Only "films that [make] incidental use of a single interview with a staff member or a few minutes of pictures of elements of the Smithsonian collections would be allowed."

In other words, new work that's crafted out of the Smithsonian's tax-funded archives, interviews with experts at its 19 museums, or access to its 142 million items would have to go through Showtime before release. You want to make a documentary and distribute it under a Creative Commons license? Not if Showtime wants to run it in primetime. This is unconscionable on its own, but what if the WIPO Broadcasting Treaty becomes law in the US? Showtime gets 50 years of copyright protection for the public domain material in each documentary.

The Smithsonian was created by an act of Congress "for the increase & diffusion of Knowledge among men." This isn't the way to do it, and they should be ashamed.

Note: I wrote this post while on a business trip in Barcelona. If you're interested in how Showtime feels about the free flow of information, you might like to know what happens when I try to visit their website:

Remember how Ted Stevens, the 82 year-old Senator from Alaska, morphed into an advocate for the public's fair use rights after his daughter bought him an iPod? IPac, the political action committee that I help run, thought that was awesome. So we launched the Congressional iPod Education Fund, where we're collecting money for iPods, stuffing them with public domain and Creative Commons-licensed content, engraving them with "Listen to the People," and shipping them to the campaigns of Senators who work on tech and copyright policy. Check it out!

I've got a couple of speaking gigs in Ontario this week. On Wednesday, Feb. 1, I'll be on a Hamilton User Group panel with Bob Young (founder of Red Hat) and Peter Salus (linguist, supergeek). It starts at 7 P.M. at the Hamilton Public Library [map].

The following night (Thursday, Feb. 2, 6 P.M.) I'll be at the Centre for Social Innovation [map] for "Social Tech Brewing," a semi-monthly speaker series. I'm excited to spend some more time with Damien Fox (former EFF intern, currently at CIPPIC) and Neil Leyton, whom I met at the "Balanced Meal" event near the ill-fated Bulte's fundraiser. Neil is a recording artist and founder of Fading Ways Music, a Creative Commons-friendly record label.

Both events will be about copyright, technology, and things that go bump in the night. Admission is free. I hope to see some of you there as well!

If you're a copyright geek, the world of theater and the performing arts is ripe with hard questions. Choreography is copyrightable under US law, so am I an infringer if I move in a certain way before a paying audience? Should playwrights be able to cancel shows in which their characters are played by actors of a different race? Do directorial contributions qualify for copyright protection? That last question is up for review in a federal case this April.

[Note: It happens that the case is being heard before Judge Lewis Kaplan, whom EFF tried to have removed from the 2600 case when it came to light that he had represented the movie studios in private practice. We were unsuccessful, and he went on to rule in the movie studios' favor in a remarkably one-sided opinion. So I hope the defendants in this case have a better time of it.]

Specifically, the case examines whether a director's choices are copyrightable. Blocking, musical selections, refining stage directions so that "picks up book" becomes "picks up red book" - all of these things are undeniably creative. But should they be copyrightable, and how would that effect the theater world? This passage on the position of John Weidman, president of the Dramatists Guild of America (representing playwrights) and author of the book "Assassins," was particularly interesting:

The director is an interpretive artist, he said, often doing brilliant work. For his work to be systematically copied by someone else, he agrees, is "manifestly unfair."

But that does not mean, he argued, that the director owns his work, any more than an actor does. Not everything creative is copyrightable. The repercussions, he said, would be too dire. If each director's staging of a relatively new play had copyright protection, very soon there would be no staging options left. The play would become so encumbered with licenses, or the risk of lawsuits, that it would be impossible to produce — a net loss to the culture. Even classic works like "Romeo and Juliet" might gradually be removed from the public domain, thus perverting the aim of copyright law, which is to increase the flow of ideas and artwork by providing an incentive to their creators. "If Leonard Bernstein had been in a position to copyright his interpretation of Mahler," Mr. Weidman asked, "would another conductor who thought that interpretation was right, and then conducted Mahler in the same way, be stealing from Bernstein?"

This highlights a particular copyright problem for theater: it's iterative, and a single contemporary play can be staged dozens of times around the world. If directors have some kind of copyright in this process, a crust of rights will start to envelope plays until they're too encumbered to stage. This would be a tragic, unconscionable development.

My friend and colleague Danny O'Brien delivered a keynote at last year's O'Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON). It's about Evil and the world of open source software. Plus, it's hilarious. Recommended for people who want to know about software patents and practical methods for increasing the amount of evil in your day-to-day. [Thanks, Jason!]

Conan O'Brien isn't part of my nightly ritual, so I'm usually the last to see stuff like this. But if you're late-night-TV-deprived like me, please enjoy this clip of James Lipton reading the verse of the New Bard, Kevin E. Federline.

I blame Jason.

Four jobs I've had:

1. Grip
2. Activist (seriously, it was on my business card)
3. General manager of a radio station
4. Graphic designer

Four movies I can watch over and over:

1. Princess Mononoke
2. Heat
3. Blade Runner
4. The Big Lebowski

Four places I've lived:

1. Toronto, Canada
2. Golden, CO
3. San Fancisco, CA
4. Chicago Heights, IL

Four TV shows I love:

1. Project Runway
2. A Cook's Tour
3. Antiques Roadshow
4. The Sopranos

Four places I've vacationed:

1. Tunis, Tunisia
2. Tokyo, Japan
3. Telluride, USA
4. Osijek, Croatia

Four of my favorite dishes:

1. Pecan Pie
2. Dim Sum (this is sort of cheating, but I can't choose one)
3. My mom's pot roast
4. My dad's pancakes

Four sites I visit daily:

1. BoingBoing
2. New York Times
3. Engadget
4. Design Observer

Four places I would rather be right now:

1. Sitting next to Laura
2. Visiting my sister on Cape Cod
3. Tokyo
4. New York

Four bloggers I am tagging:

1. Le
2. Wendy
3. Pat
4. James