copyright

Hello, more than 10 thousand members of dekeOnline! That's right. At approximately 8pm Pacific time Monday night, we once few-but-proud dekeOneers swelled to 10,000 members. We are now officially a Greater Metropolitan Web Site!

What to do with our amazing numbers? At first we were thinking, raid a neighboring imaging site and plunder their pixels. But then we figured, why bother? Better (don't you think?) to kick back, pour ourselves a few thousand cocktails, take off our 20,000 shoes, and bask in the warm glow of the increasingly crowded but ever inviting dekeLounge.

You would think Deke in particular would be basking in the glow of his direct relationship with so many potential admirers. But strangely, this week finds Deke in a scrappy mood. We start this week's Martini Hour by trying to answer an earnest question from one of our beloved listeners, Andy from St. Louis (aka Remiss63). But barely a few sentences into things, Deke goes off on a bender about copyright law and how it's been abused and manipulated to suit the needs of, not our beloved creative professionals—for whom copyright was originally intended—but The Man himself (and you know how Deke feels about The Man).... Read more » 

Last month, I listened to a panel discussion at the Microsoft Pro Photo Summit. Ever since, I've been trying to put together a comprehensive post about "orphaned works" legislation currently pending before the US Congress. (Here's a link to the full text of the Senate version.)

The term "orphan works" refers to pieces of intellectual property for which copyright is indeterminable. Read more » 

• On one hand, you can imagine legitimate reasons for wanting to be able to display or disseminate artworks by unknown (and unknowable) artists without fear of legal reprisal. This site in particular is a big believer that, once you put it out there, it becomes part of the Great Internet Ether. The purpose of copyright law, after all, is to further creativity, not inhibit it.

• On the other hand, we all know the attraction of public-domain art. It's remarkably easy for digital imagery, in particular, to get separated from the name of its creator. Who wouldn't want to stake an illegitimate claim on a really great piece of orphaned work just because, hell, it's a nice piece and who wants to pay the artist adequate compensation?

In creating dekePod, we've spent a large amount of our effort trying to balance the rights of artists and copyright holders against the idea of Free Use. As a copyright holder myself, I am of course concerned with the rights of artists to protect their works. At the same time, copyrights and the large corporations that possess them often do more to thwart the creative progress than to further it. Read more »