Hi Friends,
Everybody loves Hollywood and their protection of IP. And KCET, the public television station in Los Angeles (in Hollywood) is covering the latest IP action… PerezHilton.com’s unauthorized usage of X17 Online’s celebrity photos (and other companies’ photos as well, X17 are just the ones who are suing PerezHilton’s Mario Lavandeira).
You can watch a video on this The Fight Over Celebrity Photos on KCET’s Life & Time’s blog (and I added my prediction – X17 wins, PerezHilton loses). And you can read more about fair use on the Stanford Copyright & Fair Use Center.
On a side note, I used to volunteer at KCET, setting up a catalogue database of all their old videos from the 70s and 80s. Every morning for months I would drive down from my rent controlled apartment in Santa Monica to Hollywood for a few hours of work before going to my real job. I watched hundreds of hours of KCET news and education programs in fast motion, writing down the scenes and the time of the scene was in the tape. That way when a producer needed a video of environmental pollution they could easily find it. There were a lot of videos from the 1970’s when movie director Taylor Hackford was the news reporter. And I watched a lot of Huell Howser Videologs (Huell would stop by our room in the studio between assignments – he was just like he is in the videos – super nice guy). You can subscribe to a Video PodCast of Huell’s California’s Gold series on his California’s Gold Website, and check out the California Gold’s Google Earth Overlay and KCET’s California Gold interactive map of Los Angeles with short video segments.
What does this have to do with marketing? Well I am promoting the KCET and their video and blog post… thus the marketing aspect 🙂 And it is an interesting case for bloggers… as Nolo’s Rich Stim wrote… there is a “Fifth” Fair Use Factor: Are You Good or Bad?.
Check out KCET’s Video, Blog Post and Commentary
Peace – Tim
Original Huell image can be found on Jeff Caffrey’s Santa Monica College Media Center page.
