[Commons-Law] Inverse Copyright

[Pranesh Prakash]

Dear All,
It seems the Big Media just are not content suing for copyright infringement
of content created by them: they must, it seems, sue for content created by
others as well! This absurd situation has arisen with a series of (absurd)
political ads created by Christopher Knight, which was uploaded by him on to
YouTube. Viacom-owned VH1 used those ads in a segment of their show Web Junk
2.0, in an edition titled "Animals & Other Crap". Did Christopher Knight sue
or send cease-and-desist notices? Of course not. He found the feature funny,
and wrote about it on his blog. In a later entry, he notes:

I was quite aware that they were using my own not-for-profit work for
commercial purposes and that they should have contacted me. But I didn't
really care that they were doing that, either. It was just nice to see
something that I had worked on getting seen and appreciated by a lot more
people than what I had intended for a local audience. And I was glad that
Melody Hallman Daniel, the voice-over actress in the spot, received some
widespread notice of her considerable talent.


Further, he uploaded a clip from the Web Junk 2.0 on to YouTube, so that he
could put it up on his blog. Then began the fun.

Read more at:
http://theknightshift.blogspot.com/2007/08/viacom-hits-me-with-copyright.html

It seems it all ends well, as he notes here:
http://theknightshift.blogspot.com/2007/09/viacom-situation-update-youtube-has.html

But I wouldn't know the exact story, as that blog entry has been blocked by
college filtering software (for containing the word "youtube") in it.

Regards,
Pranesh
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