Copyright, Copyleft, Copyup, Copydown and Copywrong.

I stumbled onto two interesting copyright issues today, the first is about a film circulating on the web from the Tsunami disaster, shot by Tommy Lorentsen and licenced in an unusual way by Dagbladet in Norway.
The unusual part was that Dagbladet agreed to waiver their fee, and that all licensing fees would go in full to charity for the victims of the tsunami. Sweet deal! The not so unusual part is that the film spread like wildfire on the web, posted by many blogs, and Don't Loose the Question blog asks; Can we just disregard copyright issues during a Tsunami?
The problem with finding rights holders in this day and age will only worsen as more people post video and photo content on the web, the solution will probably have to be technical, with an "embedded" right holder/licening name in films/photos etcetera. The tsunami victims could have used that money, after all.


The other interesting thing is that The trademark Blog has read Bloglines privacy policy and asked Bloglines to dump his feed - loosing 190 subscribers in the process, as Bloglines kindly obliged. The trademark blog is published under a CC licence that allows for non-commercial use, and by the looks of it Bloglines may start having targeted advertising around all feeds soon, making their use of your feeds commercial.
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Anonymous Adgrunt's picture
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Files must be less than 5 MB.
Allowed file types: jpg jpeg gif png wav avi mpeg mpg mov rm flv wmv 3gp mp4 m4v.
Dabitch's picture

Well, looks like Martin Schwimmer really got the ball rolling on this one, see this post Can of worms - Copyright and RSS at the Microsoft Geek Blogger, which keeps track of most of the links discussing this. (Thanks MarketingFacts)

Dabitch's picture

More from Martin Schwimmer at the Trademark Blog.

If He Doesn't Like Bloglines, Why Does He Make a RSS Feed Available?

So the question is not why, if I don't like Bloglines, do I make a RSS feed available.

The question ought to be:

Is there a compelling business case for the blogger to waive effective commercial control of content in order so that the aggregator can make a full-text web-based feed available?

Or can aggregators accomodate bloggers who wish to maintain the non-commercial nature of their feeds? I will guess that if Bloglines offers a commercial opt-out, its business model will still work.