Passing-off lecture launches IPso Jure channel on YouTube

It's now over two years since a memorable dinner over which, among other things, the idea of making YouTube videos on intellectual property came up, and finally I have managed to complete the first in what I hope will be a series. It's good that one thing has now worked out well from then.

You can find the YouTube channel here and I will put a link on this blog to make it easy to find. I called this first video a brief guide to passing off, but my old friend Godfrey pointed out that 54 minutes hardly counts as brief so I amended the description (although considering the size of Christopher Wadlow's great book on the subject, 951 pages in the 4th edition and no doubt more in the 5th edition which was published last year but the publisher's website doesn't reveal how many, I think under an hour counts as brief). There's only one possible response to that, and I am delighted that Pascal is the man to quote: "Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte." (Pretentious? Moi?)

I made the video using the Movie Maker program that comes as part of Windows these days (or perhaps it's an app that you have to download). It was very clunky, and I hope I can find an alternative that will make it easier to adjust the time each slide remains on screen - surely there must be a program that allows you just to drag the end of that image along the timeline to coincide with the right point in the audio file. If you're interested I will share my findings in future posts. And if you're not interested, I'll still do that but you can ignore me. If you have suggestions for suitable programs, I'd like to know!

Now that I have broken the logjam that had been building up for a long, long time, I hope I will find it easier to be briefer in future presentations. Certainly I already have several ideas for improving this video, although my next task will be to address trade marks, responding to a request I received a few months ago. But briefly!

The Washington Post: YouTube’s copyright system has taken Rand Paul’s presidential announcement offline

This report of a spectacular own goal almost made me laugh (but the excesses of modern intellectual property law and practice will never get past that "almost" - they are more likely to make me cry). The headline tells you everything.

I suppose it illustrates the importance of clearing rights for all the uses to which a copyright work might be put in the modern age. Perhaps Senator Paul, or at least his people, had obtained the myriad permissions (or the omnibus permission) needed but YouTube's robots, acting as WMG's agents, took it down anyway.

The reference in the article to huge music companies (the expression "Big Copyright" comes to mind) being able preemptively to apply copyright law encapsulates the problem in a way I have not read before: I will try to file that expression away for future use, although I think it is better called pre-emptive (my dictionary tells me that the hyphen is correct in the adjectival form but not in the adverb) enforcement, not application, which is too imprecise a term for lawyers to use (acceptable, though, for journalists, I think). Maybe it is a synonym for bullying. And read in the context of the Senator's attack on the power of special interests, the story becomes even more powerful.