So much has been said about the Barack Obama electoral victory by print and broadcast media all over the world, including the Philippines. I read somewhere that there were “mock polls” conducted in Metro Manila in which he had also won.
I wrote about the US president-elect way back when he was running for senator for Illinois and became instantly fascinated by his story. He ran “almost unopposed,” and his educational background was extremely impressive: Columbia University for undergrad, Harvard Law School for his law degree, president of the Harvard Law Review. You’ve got to be an exceptionally gifted law student to make it to the presidency of the Harvard Law Review. His wife, Michelle, also has an impressive educational background. She went to Princeton for undergrad and Harvard for her law degree, coming as she does — as well as Barack Obama himself — from humble, working-class families. These educational credentials from two people raised by working-class parents and grandparents are one of the most impressive dimensions of this electoral victory.
Soon after his senate victory, when his book, The Audacity of Hope, came out, a dear friend of mine gave me a copy as a birthday present. It is a book that makes extremely good reading for someone like me who first got interested in the amazing background of this man who, at a young age, had begun a political career running for senator, winning resoundingly as he did just a couple of days ago, the first African-American to do so!
And now, the hard grind begins. As the US media have been saying, now the most toxic economic crisis within living memory, the magnitude and intensity of national security issues, the heartbreaking state of unemployment in the US, the critical decisions that have to be undertaken vis-à-vis the wars being fought on several fronts, etc., have become the Bush legacy to Obama!
But the Obama-Biden team is an excellent one, and as he forms his cabinet, he cannot afford to make a mistake about anyone. Among several reasons is the fact that the issues facing the president-elect involve the global community, including our country.
As far as his pictures on the World Wide Web are concerned, they have become part of the public domain and can be replicated, as well as any books he has written, just like the poems of my favorites, Robert and Elizabeth Browning, just like the works of Rembrandt, Picasso, etc., which form part of the public domain and can be reproduced and copied without violating the copyright laws of the world.
Ordinarily, however, whether a particular use of a copyrighted work is permissible is dependent upon four factors: the character and purpose of the use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount of the work that is used, and the effect of the use on the market for the copyrighted work. The most important, as a number of judicial precedents has dictated, is the last factor, which is the market effect of the proposed fair use.
The United States has enacted the “fair use” doctrine as a result of statutes that implement this doctrine, where a person will have the legally protected right to copy, print, and redistribute certain e-content, even if the copyright owner has not granted his or her permission. “Fair use” is essential.
The Philippines and the international community permit specific kinds of copying, printing and redistribution of copyright-protected material without the permission of the copyright owner. As the examples mentioned above suggest, those that are 100 years old or more are in the public domain, and they may be copied, printed and redistributed legally without permission from the copyright holder.
As every Internet user should know, in spite of the fact that e-data, including text, information and pictures, are easy to copy, print, and redistribute, this does not give a person the right to do so. The fact that no copyright notice appears on an Internet site does not mean it is permissible to copy e-content from that site and e-mail it.
Under the Berne Convention, the resolutions of which have set the international standard for copyright protection, any original work fixed in a tangible medium is automatically protected by copyright regardless of whether any copyright formalities are executed. This simply means that the absence of a copyright notice does not necessarily mean that a work is not protected by copyright.
Whereas the conventional legal solution to ensuring one’s right to copy, print, and redistribute e-data found on the Internet is simply to obtain the permission of the copyright owner, in cyberspace, it is often not easy to determine where or who the owner is, and how to obtain permission.
The webmaster of a particular Internet site, even if empowered by license to use everything on the Internet site, may not own all the rights to the e-content being sought. Generally, securing permission from a webmaster to use e-content will only free the users of the e-content from an infringement cause of action brought by entities related to that site. In some cases, this sort of protection is all that is needed.
As one of the explanations of “fair use” implies, by copying a small portion of e-data rather than a large portion, fair use will more likely be found. Similarly, if the proposed use is more likely to help the marketing of the e-content than the reduction of the market for the e-content, fair use will likewise more likely be found.
Of course, we all still remember that in 1994, that great company, Microsoft, paid US$5 million to a defunct Internet company to settle a copyright/trademark infringement lawsuit over the rights of the name “Internet Explorer.” Synet contended that it started using the name in 1994 before Microsoft began distributing its identically named web browser.
GoTo.com, Inc. sued the Walt Disney Co. after Disney launched its Go Network in December 1998. Walt Disney had adopted a logo for the site that resembled a traffic light, specifically a green circle within a yellow square with the word “GO” in the middle in a white font. However, GoTo.com had earlier begun using a logo on its site with the words “GO” and “TO” in a white font stacked vertically within a green circle and often displayed against a square yellow background. The court ruled that the two companies’ logos were “remarkably similar.” As a result, not only did Walt Disney change its logo, but it also paid GoTo.com the astonishing amount of $21.5 million.
The abovementioned cases have more to do with trademarks than e-content, but infringement of copyrights and trademarks have fundamental rules/legislation that do have basic similarities. The world of trademarks and patents under the World Wide Web has become so vast that litigations are unavoidable.
A Filipino media lawyer who refused to have his name mentioned told me at a benefit event recently that “if I put out a magazine that was called Piolo Pascual Magazine and it was a pornographic magazine, that would clearly be stopped, even though Piolo has been posing a lot of times for publicity with his top bare up to just about there.” Piolo Pascual has a giant billboard on the highway that is bigger than life. In the e-commerce world it’s no different putting it on the Internet.
The dividing lines are clearer in the paper-commerce world, where such misappropriation of names has been litigated for decades.
Of course Barack Obama has not copyrighted his name or the e-content of anything he has said, or any of his speeches. As the newly elected president of what a lot of people have called the “most powerful country in the world,” — but, may I add, with a huge debt amounting to approximately $3 trillion — his name and everything he says are part of e-content on the World Wide Web.
They are part of the public domain that has become “uncopyrightable,” if there is such a word.
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