Geek With Opinions

First off some administrative business. I was planning on doing a weekly post about stuff I learned this week. However on my first week I decided that was not such a good idea. With the items I had lined up to talk about, I would have to have written a short novel in order to cover it all.

Alright time for something a little more useful. Lest week, Microsoft hosted Mix09 last week. While there were a lot of the run of the mill sessions on WPF, Sliverlight and ASP.NET, there was also a few hidden gems on other topics. One of the topics was a short session on Copyright.

“Copyright Laws for Web Designers and Developers”
Presenter: Jonathan Zuck
http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/B03M

The session covered examples of what is considered copyright infringement and what is not. It also cover what is considered fair use. Jonathan did a good job giving an overview of what  copyright is, the DMCA, and what fair use is in just under 22 minuets. It was just long enough to get a taste of why copyright is important but short enough to keep your attention through the whole thing.

Here is some of the more important notes that I picked up for the session recording.

• An individual can break copyright even if he/she do not profit from the act.
• A parody on its own is not covered by fair use. A parody must also include criticism (bad or good) of the original work for it to be covered by fair use. A parody alone is a copyright infraction.

Overall it was worth the 22 minuets as a catch up on why Copyright is important for any developer or designer.

Copyright is broken here in the states. The rules look to be taken advatage of. For example one can not say a name of a major NFL event in public with out fear of the NFL because the name of the event was not properlly licenced from the NFL. It has getting to the point where it is so bad that it becomes laughable.

Anywho, check out the session and other sessions from Mix09 at http://live.visitmix.com/.

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