legality of home recording

[Gordon Ingram]

I'm no expert in IP law, but I have read a little bit about it  
because I think it raises fascinating philosophical issues. It seems  
to me that the distribution of incidental music (or even children's  
renditions of songs) on a database such as CHILDES would be a  
textbook example of fair use, since "educational purpose" is one of  
the most frequently cited examples of fair use.

Even in the case to which you refer, where the recording of the baby  
dancing (while very cute!) has little or no educational value, fair  
use is not in question: all parties agree that the recording is  
legal. That's why it can be linked to from the CNET story! The point  
at issue is who has responsibility for assessing whether a particular  
recording constitutes fair use. The plaintiff and the EFF are  
claiming that this is the responsibility of the copyright holder, and  
hence that she is entitled to damages because the takedown notice was  
issued by the copyright holders in bad faith, knowing that it was  
fair use.  The copyright holders claim that the existing appeals  
mechanism to reinstate fair-use recordings is sufficient protection  
against the occasional mistaken takedown notice. The judge agrees  
that the copyright holder should try to determine whether recordings  
are fair use before issuing a takedown notice, but doubts that they  
were acting in bad faith.

So this case would only really be relevant if a copyright holder were  
to issue a takedown notice against something in CHILDES. Hopefully  
that is not going to happen!

Best regards,
Gordon

===================================
Gordon Ingram
Institute of Cognition and Culture
Queen's University, Belfast
Tel: +44 28 9097 1340
Mob: +44 7973 136820
http://www.qub.ac.uk/icc
===================================


On 23 Aug 2008, at 02:23, Margaret Fleck wrote:

>
> This may well be an artifact of how existing corpora are recorded,  
> since
> audio sources frequently tend to be on in natural home environments.
> Also, I'm not sure it's legal to distribute recordings of  
> copyrighted songs
> even if the performer is an amateur, since there are also performance
> rights involved.
>
>
> Margaret M. Fleck
> University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
> margaretmfleck at yahoo.com
>
> --- On Thu, 8/21/08, Brian MacWhinney <macw at cmu.edu> wrote:
> From: Brian MacWhinney <macw at cmu.edu>
> Subject: Re: legality of home recording
> To: info-childes at googlegroups.com
> Date: Thursday, August 21, 2008, 9:23 AM
>
> Folks,
>      I don't think this ruling will have any impact on any of the  
> materials in either CHILDES or TalkBank. I have listened to perhaps  
> a thousand hours of these materials and the only instance of clear  
> use of music in the CHILDES and TalkBank materials is in the  
> segment of the Dresden SLA corpus that studies how music can  
> support  language learning.  Moreover, in these materials, it is  
> the school-aged  children themselves who are the performers, since  
> they are singing the songs.  By the way, they are really great!
>
> -- Brian MacWhinney
>
> On Aug 21, 2008, at 7:38 AM, Margaret Fleck wrote:
>
>>
>> The following legal case
>>    http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10021999-93.html?hhTest=1
>> is worth following, because it directly addresses the question of  
>> the legality
>> of distributing recordings with incidental background audio/video,  
>> something
>> that could easily occur in language recordings done in homes or other
>> natural settings.  Or even foreground audio material, if you are  
>> recordings
>> subjects who are at all musical.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Margaret (Margaret Fleck, U. Illinois)
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
>
> >


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