Welcome to Link Music

 Contact info:

 address:                                             tel 323 352 6352

 7201 Melrose Ave                                                          fax 509 352 6352

 Suite 201                                                                              email info@linkmuZic.com

 Los Angeles, CA 90046                                             skype linkmusic

Quotes and Licenses:    ANdrea Bari      andrea@linkmuZic.com

Legal:         Steve Winogradsky                 www.winogradskysobel.com

Research and Thoughts

Copyleft: AN academic culture

The CopyLeft movement is a diverse and growing alliance of artists, authors, activists, and legal theorists who are building an alternative to the current restrictive regime of intellectual property controls.  The movement grows out of concerns over well-funded corporate strategies to privatize and commodify all human knowledge, creativity, and meaning.  Corporate tactics include legal bullying (filing lawsuits against teenagers sharing movies or songs), neocolonial bioprospecting (genetically modifying and patenting seeds and other forms of life), and aggressive trademark and patent acquisition and protection (such as Fox News' famous lawsuit against Al Franken's use of the phrase "Fair and Balanced" in his 2003 book [1]).

The CopyLeft movement is the constructive policy proposal that was developed to provide a practical, tangible alternative to some of these corporate abuses.  Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford University law professor and one of the leaders of the movement, describes some of the goals for authors and artists using electronic creations:  "We have an explosion of technology inviting people to be creative" through mashups, sampling, compilations, and other techniques, "but the way the laws are written, all this activity is presumptively illegal.  We want to move away from a maximalist position to create a future in which creativity can occur in a protected space without taking away anyone's rights."  [2]  Lessig's 2004 book, "Free Culture," inspired a group of students at Swarthmore to found Students for a Free Culture after they won a lawsuit against Diebold Election Systems; Diebold was found guilty of abusing copyright law for threatening the students after they posted a series of internal Diebold emails revealing widespread knowledge of flaws in the company's automated vote-counting software.  Now the movement is gathering momentum, and one member of Students for Free Culture at USC noted, "Copyright should be a boring subject, but more and more people are realizing how big this is ... You mention the name Lawrence Lessig to the right people and they'll just go bananas."  [3]

The intellectual and legal brain-trust of the CopyLeft movement is the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.  Many of the movement's goals are implemented through Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization promoting flexible copyright licenses that allow authors (rather than corporate publishers and copyright/patent holding companies) to specify the permissible uses of their creative works.  From the introduction of the Creative Commons protocol in 2003 to the Rio De Janeiro symposium of "an unusual global alliance of artists, scientists, and lawyers" in June, 2006, approximately 145 million creative works have been licensed; blogs account for the largest number of registrations, followed by images and then music. [4]

All items on this website for which I have rights and authority under copyright law are made available under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.  This means that you are free to distribute, copy, display, and/or perform the work, and to make derivative works, for commercial or non-commercial uses; but you must attribute the work to Elvin K. Wyly.  For any reuse or redistribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work.  Any of these conditions can be waived with permission from the copyright holder.  Note that your fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.  Here is a human-readable summary of the license, and here is a lawyer-readable license.  For further information on the terms of Creative Commons licenses, send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

References:

[1]  Al Franken (2003).  Lies (And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them):  A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.  New York:  Dutton/Penguin.  Franken describes the origins of the book:  "It all started when Harvard's Kennedy School of Government asked me to serve as a fellow at its Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy.  After my varied and celebrated career in television, movies, publishing, and the lucrative world of corporate speaking, being a fellow at Harvard seemed, frankly, like a step down.  I couldn't think of anything less appealing than molding the minds of tomorrow's leaders ... To my surprise and delight, though, all Harvard wanted me to do was show up every once in a while and write something about something.  That gave me an idea.  'Would it be okay if I wrote a scathingly partisan attack on the right-wing media and the Bush administration?'  'No problem,' Harvard said absentmindedly..."  Franken (2003), p. xi-xii

[2]  Larry Rohter (2006).  "Some Rights Reserved:  Advocating Flexible Copyrights."  New York Times, June 26, B1, B6.

[3]  Rachel Aviv (2007).  "File-Sharing Students Fight Copyright Constraints."  New York Times, October 10, A21.

[4]  Rohter, "Some Rights Reserved," B6.

[5]  Lawrence Lessig (2009).  "Against Transparency:  The Perils of Openness in Government."  The New Republic, October 9.

News and Thoughts

Reject the PROTECT IP Act

P2P and user uploaded material are IP issues that cannot be solved with bills such as COICA and PIPA. This PROTECT IP Act is a threatening sequel to last year's COICA Internet censorship bill that would—like its predecessor—invite Internet security risks, threaten online speech, and hamper Internet innovation.

Here is the LA TIMES and THE NEW YORK TIMES opinions voicing concerns on the legislation.

To urge your members of Congress to reject this dangerous bill you may send a letter through https://www.eff.org/action or by cliccking here.