The University of Southern California Free Culture group held an event where students were invited to speak their mind. This event was called the “Free Speech Zone” like the caged areas in which people are allowed to speak freely outside major political party rallies and other corporate-sponsored events around the world.

Students spoke about the environment, politics, art, their peers, their haircuts, what they ate for breakfast — anything that came to mind. Even more students brought sidewalk chalk with which they wrote words and drew pictures within the “Free Speech Zone” boundaries.

Usually these “zones” are well outside any route where the invited guests would be likely to see them and hear their objections.

The USC fined the Free Culture group for posting unauthorized posters ($1/poster) and charged the group an undisclosed amount for removal of sidewalk chalk.

The irony, oh the irony.

The posters read “This is Not A Free Speech Zone” because the Free Culture group was protesting USC’s policy on free expression and dissent which appears to be in opposition to “the development of human beings and society as a whole through the cultivation and enrichment of the human mind and spirit“.

C-SPAN has promised to relicense the Congressional and federal agency footage under a more amenable license: (emphasis theirs)

C-SPAN is introducing a liberalized copyright policy for current, future, and past coverage of any official events sponsored by Congress and any federal agency– about half of all programming offered on the C-SPAN television networks–which will allow non-commercial copying, sharing, and posting of C-SPAN video on the Internet, with attribution.

So many of the salient details are left out, I’ll hold my thanks to C-SPAN until I learn precisely what they’re distributing and under what license. License choice, quality of source material, reliability of footage stamping (it’s routine for C-SPAN to stick an “All Rights Reserved” at the end of their footage), and more will all have to be addressed. It’s not clear if they’ll make high-quality footage available through their website, through a willing carrier (like The Internet Archive), or leave it up to the public to digitize a relatively poor signal and upload it to others.

They say Creative Commons somehow inspired them to do this (The new C-SPAN policy borrows from the approach to copyright known in the online community as “Creative Commons.”). But I suspect something else is going on. Carl Malamud recently put pointed questions to C-SPAN essentially asking them to justify their restrictions when the American cable-subscribing public covers most if not all of C-SPAN’s bills.

Therefore I have to wonder: if we’re covering their costs (at least), why aren’t we getting completely unfettered access to all of C-SPAN’s works even for commercial use?

C-SPAN’s announcement gives examples of what we will and won’t get increased access to:

Examples of events included under C-SPAN’s new expanded policy include all congressional hearings and press briefings, federal agency hearings, and presidential events at the White House. C-SPAN’s copyright policy will not change for the network’s studio productions, all non-federal events, campaign and political event coverage, and the network’s feature programming, such as Book TV and original history series.

Why are these works copyrightable at all? I’m bothered by this because it means that this situation could change; later on this copyright license can be discontinued or altered to take away the freedoms we are being promised in these works. Thus works licensed under the revised license are less advantageous to us. I’m also curious why we’re not getting the freedom to distribute derivative works. A practical side-effect of this is that C-SPAN can challenge our fair use by calling it copyright infringement.

According to Kurt Hanson, webstreaming audio tracks whose copyright is held by clients of the Recording Industry Association of America (what I’ll call “RIAA tracks”) just became a lot more expensive.

In a new fee schedule (effective retroactively to the start of 2006), online radio stations playing RIAA tracks now have to pay $0.0011 per song-per listener (also known as a “performance”). This means that the RIAA track webcaster has to figure out how many downloads of the song there were and pay that times $0.0011 every month this year. Next year and every year through 2010 this fee will go up, according to the current fee schedule:

And no RIAA track webcaster pays less than $500/month; that’s the new minimum payment in this scheme.

I’m not sure if this is in addition to or a replacement for the content restrictions which prevent playing songs from the same artist more than a certain number of times in a row, or in a 3-hour period, and so on. But perhaps that doesn’t matter—it’s not hard to see how the new fee schedule makes webcasting RIAA tracks completely unaffordable. Just run some sample calculations out to 1 year and watch the fees add up beyond what small stations (individuals and small volunteer outfits) can afford to pay.

And then there’s the question raised any time webcasting with the RIAA comes up: Webcasters should take on all of this complexity, cost, and hassle so they can do business with an organization that treats people so shabbily?

I know that many artists don’t see the harm in signing with an RIAA client. They think it will be their path to riches even though it’s far more likely they’ll have to make albums just to pay off the label/loan shark. This fee schedule, written at the behest of the RIAA, does not benefit artists. Read the definition of “performance” closely and you’ll see the incentive to play fewer RIAA tracks and webcast to fewer people. I suggest that artists record and distribute their own work online, and retain the copyright to their songs as well as their recordings. Artists are often less popular than they’d like to be, so it’s better to retain copyright power than to sign it over to a label. Artists who still want to work with the RIAA through their label should advocate for a small uniform fee anyone can pay the RIAA in exchange for distribution rights in any medium. If the fee is small it will encourage compliance and more fees will be paid to the RIAA (I’ll be surprised if a dime of this money goes to any but the most popular artists who need the money the least, but more exposure is an indirect benefit). I’m guessing this is where things are headed and once again we’ll (as Cory Doctorow once put it) drag the RIAA “kicking and screaming to the money tree”.