Speaking of SXSW, Glenn Otis Brown posted about the panel he hosted there on Creative Commons and filmmaking, especially showcasing some of the efforts of David Ball (a first time filmmaker) and his Fourthwall Films, who's decided to use CC rather than traditional distribution and why he hopes people will remix his film. Ball wants to "seed a movement" where the filmmaker and the audience are more closely linked.

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Evan Prodromou of Wikitravel has become my favorite "cc-licenses crackpot" for a discussion he started in that same list yesterday. He raised some questions about the Creative Commons efforts that have troubled me as well -- that on some level the mark has come to mean so many different things under so many different licenses that the concept fragments into tax-code-like complexity. I've had similar reactions, wishing that a CC mark meant I was free to use, when in fact in many cases you still need to contact the rights holder anyway (just as you would under traditional copyright.)

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The "Fair Use" claims that didn't seem to influence a San Fransisco judge in the DVD X Copy case rise from the dead to muster up another convincing argument, this time in an unusual C|Net article exploring the legalities of DVD to Pocket PC 1.0 developed by an Amsterdam company that's carefully watching the evolution of the legal issues in the U.S. The application is designed to allow you to copy a DVD onto a 128MB or 256MB memory card by highly compressing the results. CEO of Makayama Software Vincent Verweij argues that his software is "a textbook example of fair use."

Creative Commons' new search engine is an interesting experiment, allowing a refining search across CC licensed content. I thought, "What a great way to find pieces to collaborate with ... I wonder if this is even a good clipart library?" The results that I found suggest that it might be startlingly good for that -- but is everything marked as "public domain" by a CC license really as public domain as certified? Maybe not ...

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While I stand by my previous arguments about the general lack of clear argument from the "Grey Tuesday" protest, some interesting insight from the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out that EMI probably doesn't even have a valid sound recording copyright claim (since sound recordings before 1972 don't benefit from Federal protection, just common law.)

There, I've said it: Grey Tuesday, as an "act of civil disobediance," is silly. Don't let my blog from yesterday fool you into thinking I'm only anti-RIAA ... I get equally disgusted with the anti-anti-RIAA folks for the same reasons: because their arguments, ultimately, remove control from artists. I want to get excited about Grey Tuesday, but I just can't, because the shrill and slanted arguments from the proponants are piss poor.

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San Fransisco courts continue to make intellectual property law a tennis-match of bad decisions. You'd have thought that after taking nine months to consider her decision, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston would bring back a ruling that shed some light on the issue of DVD copying software. Instead, Judge Illston made it more confusing than ever.

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