cruel to be kind

Via Matt May on the podcaster mailing list:

The Podcasting Legal Guide is now live.
I had a chance to see a draft of this, and it’s a must-read, especially for people using others’ music and media works. Video podcasters are also covered. You are likely to sweat, scream in horror, or clench your teeth at times, but push through it. This is the most comprehensive guide to the rules of the road that I’ve seen.

The Legal Guide and the Welcome are surely great but as I answered to it on the list:

“This Guide covers only US-based legal questions. Since podcasts are typically distributed world wide, legal issues from other jurisdictions are relevant for you but we are unable to include them at this time. ”

Annoying. Yes, I understand why it is US-Law only but there are enough parts of the Copyright Laws provided through international treaties which could have been mentioned in here. For this being a basis or more jurisdictions to be included it would have been wise to separate the normal text from the US-law specific text.

Now of course no one can adapt it by just adding / exchanging the parts which are relevant to the local laws. *sigh*

Before you start protesting on me not taking a moment of praise for the work which is been done … Let me remind you that you are reading a blog of a German who has to blog in a non native language. A working babelfish is Utopia, I can deal with it.

But I am highly annoyed when topics of such importance and interest are build in a way that makes it impossible to adapt it easily for different legal systems. I am sure many people (the ones from outside of the US) would love to see which parts are regulated by international agreed copyright and licencing terms and which are just US law.

This is just like somebody doing a web page covered completely in Javascript and Frames and later complains about not being able to change things or not being recognized by search engines. And that by now it is too expensive to change anything. Well, it is expensive because you did start off the wrong way.

Back to the Guide. Is it totally useless? No, it will help me look into the American copyright a bit deeper. As most of the discussions in English are about American limited usages, laws and such, it surely comes in handy.

Anybody wants to discuss what obscenity is? Had not had that discussion in a long time …

Tags: european view, podcasting