A big part of the reason for changing copyright law in 1909 was the fear that player pianos would destroy the market for sheet music and even (potentially) live performances. So the law was changed… but the player piano soon died. But the copyright law it gave us stuck around. When radio came about, we got changes to copyright law to deal with that. When the internet came about, we got the DMCA. So what’s next? Perhaps the internet’s new big buzzword: “the real-time web.”

[...] the natural inclination of anyone who is struck by a piece of creative work is to share it. And since “sharing” on the Internet is the same as “copying,” this puts you square in copyright’s crosshairs. Cory Doctoron: Why I fight Copyfight

Vous l’avez compris : c’est un extraordinaire outil que ce moteur de recherche expérimental, qui devrait non seulement révolutionner le travail des photographes et graphistes dans le contrôle du droit d’auteur, mais aussi permettre aux agences de communication de vérifier simplement et rapidement, en quelques clics, si une photographie est déjà utilisée ou non …

A great TinEye review by Cedric Girard on Aube-Nature (in French folks!).

Paula: curious [about] how famous you already are ) try TinyEye.

kkart: This thing is INCREDIBLE!
Oh yes, we agree. TinEye is incredible!

evile33: That thing blows me away…I got approved and got the FF extension…it’s awesome!

The Firefox extension we developed is awesome of course. Allows you to search for any image you find on the web with a single click so if you are a TinEye user, don’t go home without installing it.

We will get back to work at the Ideeplex and make TinEye better! We are working on an extension for IE so that should be out there soon!

[...] si la création libre est quasi inexistante dans le milieu professionnel, n’est-ce pas parce qu’elle est incompatible avec le professionnalisme ? N’est-ce pas justement le volontariat qui caractérise la culture libre?

Cory Doctorow (Boing Boing) has a great little article in The Guardian titled "Copyright law should distinguish between commercial and cultural uses". This is something that I have been thinking about for quite some time. Since we are in the business of tracking images and videos, fair use and copyright infringements are daily conversations at Idée (in a good way, we are idealists after all!). I have to say that I agree with Cory and it is high time we started thinking about a copyright overhaul. What we have had in the past is simply a set of copyright rules that apply to everyone "from Sony Pictures to your neighbour’s eight-year-old" but the world has changed and then came the Internet.

"We need to stop shoe-horning cultural use into the little carve-outs in copyright, such as fair dealing and fair use. Instead we need to establish a new copyright regime that reflects the age-old normative consensus about what’s fair and what isn’t at the small-scale, hand-to-hand end of copying, display, performance and adaptation."

and there is a way for you to get involved and shape things.

(Cory’s photo by Bart Nagel)