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New Media Rights answers questions from the public and takes media inquiries regarding the law and technology.  Please contact us if you have a question and we'll be glad to assist you. Our free legal and how-to resources, as well as our free public media studio and equipment, are supported by donations by individuals like you, so please consider donating today!

Fair Use

Legal and How-to Guides for Citizen Media Creators and Online Publishing

Webtreats Glowing Neon Social Medi Icons by Flikr user webtreats used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license

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Best Practices for Creative Commons attributions - how to attribute works you reuse under a Creative Commons license

Submitted by New Media Rights on Fri, 12/11/2009 - 12:49

Find out how to site or source creative commons work. Creative commons work allows you to share, remix and reuse legally, just make sure to check out what license it is under.

“creative commons” by Flikr user libraryman used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license

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A New Leistungsschutzrecht? Say It's Nicht So!

Submitted by New Media Rights on Fri, 10/30/2009 - 10:05

It's tough being a publisher these days.  Of course, no one is having much fun in the current economic downturn, but publishers were up against it even before the slowdown.  Circulations have been down across the board for years now, which in turn has slashed the advertising revenues that print publications have always relied upon to survive.  It's just a bad time to be publishing newspapers and magazines, at least while using the classical publishing business model.

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RIAA Asks Schoolkids To Assist With Propaganda

Last week, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) announced an update to Music-Rules!, its flagship "curriculum" for teaching copyright law to schoolkids.

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New Media Guides Legal and How-to guides

Welcome to our Legal and How-to resource center.  We hope these guides will help you, the user/creator,  to learn about

  • Rights and laws on the Internet
  • How to use new technologies and social media in your own life
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michael donahue's picture

Lost in Translation: Rosetta Stone sues Google for Trademark infringement

Submitted by michael donahue on Mon, 07/13/2009 - 10:02

Rosetta Stone, a foreign language education provider, filed suit against Google in federal court last week for allegedly infringing on the company's trademark.  The conflict arose over Google's AdWords program which allows third parties to purchase keywords for advertising purposes. The result is that when a consumer runs a Google search for "Rosetta Stone", their search results will display paid advertisements of competitors as "sponsored links". What do you thingk, trademark infringement or fair competition?

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michael donahue's picture

Trademark holders rush to secure usernames on Facebook

Submitted by michael donahue on Fri, 06/26/2009 - 10:54

Trademark holders are rushing to protect their marks on Facebook as a result of the new "username" feature.  Facebook recently granted all registered users the right to create personalized usernames in the form of URLs (www.facebook.com/username) because it expedites the search process for individuals and businesses.  With the creation of the username, you can now be linked directly to the profile you are looking for instead of wasting time scanning thousands of search results. While it seems the username is a helpful tool, many trademark holders are worried that cybersquatters will jump on this opportunity to wrongfully register their marks. How will the new Facebook policy towards markholders affect legitimate free speech.

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art neill's picture

The AP is going stop bloggers from pirating content (or quoting in fair use for legitimate reasons)

Submitted by art neill on Tue, 06/02/2009 - 14:00

The AP says it is taking aim at "wholesale theft" with new technology that is aimed at targeting reposting of "entire articles." The new technology is supposed to simply flag questionable articles for lawyers and paralegals to then review.

The question is will the new technology be so limited, or will the AP use the technology to follow the same path it took filing DMCA takedown notices falsely characterizing the law regarding the Drudge retort's postings as follows:

"...the use is not fair use simply because the work copied happened to be
a news article and that the use is of the headline and the first few
sentences only ."

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art neill's picture

Alice in Wonderland song and video Remix

Submitted by art neill on Fri, 05/01/2009 - 11:10

"Alice," an electronic piece of music of which 90% is composed using sounds recorded from the Disney film 'Alice In Wonderland'. Phenomenal remix skills on display here. 

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Somebody’s Looking For A Fight

Maureen Dowd finished up with Hilary Clinton; now she’s on to Google, with this trenchant presentation that misses the point while disseminating all sorts of hogwash: Dinosaur at the Gate (pdf)

Google is in a battle royal over whether it has the right to profit so profligately from newspaper content at a time when journalism is in such jeopardy.

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