Two separate reports today about two separate events but both are directly related to the wildly diverse perceptions about copyright which are being flung about in America today.

The first is the PBS science series “NOVA” and their news, as reported in Wired’s Underwire blog:

When Tuesday’s Nova special, “Car of the Future,” rolls its end credits, don’t expect the story to end there. In a television first, PBS and Nova have decided to post 240 clips of interviews from the show online for anyone to use within their own projects. The clips, which include content that aired as well as some that didn’t, will be released under a Creative Commons license.

The second story is from a Consumerist post about EMI suing MP3Tunes:

Today, MP3tunes’ CEO Michael Robertson sent out an email to all users of the online music backup and place-shifting service MP3tunes.com, asking them to help publicize EMI’s ridiculous and ignorant lawsuit against the company. EMI believes that consumers aren’t allowed to store their music files online, and that MP3tunes is violating copyright law by providing a backup service. (And we’re not using a euphemism here—it really is a backup/place-shifting service and not a file sharing site in disguise.)

EMI believed that copies, stored securely online by legitimate owners of the music tracks, was a viloation of its copyrights and actually managed to convince a judge they had the right to demand MP3Tunes turn over all the music stored online by their customers. Fortunately, Michael Robertson didn’t take too kindly to that idea and went to court to get another opinion on the matter - which resulted in this follow up post on Michael Robertson’s blog:

A New York Judge has denied a request by EMI to force MP3tunes to turn over all music files for its 125,000 users. For now, this means the contents of personal music Lockers will remain private.

Court Ruling Denies EMI In court EMI v MP3tunes, EMI demanded that MP3tunes provide copies of the more than 100 million songs in their subscribers’ personal music Lockers. MP3tunes offers a free and paid service for people to store their music files digitally so customer or music fans can both keep them backed-up and listen to them anywhere through a Net radio, like those from Logitech, Reciva or Terratec, or from any Net connected device, such as a Wii or PC. The newest feature allows subscribers to automatically sync their music files to a device of their choosing so all their music is where they want it to be, without the hassles of running software and plugging devices in via USB cables. All access to a music Locker requires a unique username and password, and there is absolutely no sharing between Lockers.

… and this …

EMI is trying to eliminate online storage and take people back to a prehistoric time before Internet services existed. I’m not sure the Judge saw this as a privacy issue, but he got it right when he rejected EMI’s demands to turn over personal files for thousands of unsuspecting people. It is an early, but very important, ruling in our battle with EMI. This fight will likely prove to be a long one, because some record labels would rather spend millions in attorney fees trying to outlaw all new technologies, like online storage and web hosting, rather than figure out how to use them to grow their business. At stake is personal ownership and privacy in the digital era – both issues worth fighting for.

So there you have two very distinctive approaches to copyright. On one side of the coin is a public broadcaster (doing what the CBC should be doing here in Canada) and making their work available for use by their viewers - on the other side of the coin you have a corporation attempting to extend their ownership and control of media by actively (and certainly through an abuse of legal clout) attempting to remove it from the hands of their customers.

All it takes is one ill-informed jurist to grant the kind of over-reaching controls requested by EMI - and similar to the entire take down of the Wikileaks domain earlier this year.

As Robertson also stated in his post:

No corporation should have the right to demand the content of tens of thousands of personal accounts be turned over to them. There’s no reason to suggest that the users are doing anything but listening to their own music collections in a modern manner. There are millions of Gmail accounts that have MP3 files stored in them – same with Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft’s email and hosting services. If EMI can gain unfettered access to wantonly look through personal accounts on MP3tunes those services will be next.

Cheers.