If you’re looking for images for your blog or some other project then you most likely use Google Image Search. It does the job well but has one slight problem: it offers up copyrighted images. If you’re concerned about staying on the right side of the law and don’t want to waste your time trying to determine the fair-use of an image, then may I recommend Sprixi, a fresh image search engine that keeps you legit.
Sprixi has one main benefit besides its legal images: all images are sorted by other users for relevancy, so your search term of choice will determine far better results than Google.
Jack Kirby co-created countless characters for Marvel, including the Fantastic Four, X-Men, Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Captain America, Avengers, etc. His estate has sent out 45 notices of copyright infringement to such companies as Marvel Entertainment, Disney, Paramount, Sony and others, insisting they intended to own the full copyright for every character by 2014. This could be a major problem for Disney, who recently purchased Marvel.
Under copyright law, the author or his heirs can begin a process to regain copyrights a certain period of years after the original grant. If Mr. Kirby’s four children were to gain the copyright to a co-created character, they might become entitled to a share of profits from films or other properties using it. They might also find themselves able to sell rights to certain characters independently of Marvel, Disney, or the various studios that have licensed the Marvel properties for their hit films.
In July, a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled that Warner Brothers and its DC Comics unit had not violated rights of the Siegel heirs in handling internal transactions related to Superman, but an earlier ruling had already granted the heirs a return of their share in the copyright. In the late 1990s, Mr. Toberoff represented a television writer, Gilbert Ralston, who sued Warner over the rights to the film “Wild, Wild West.” The suit was ultimately settled.
Copyright issues have become increasingly difficult for Hollywood, as it continues to trade on characters and stories that were created decades ago, but are now subject to deadlines and expiration dates under federal copyright law.
[Editor's Note: It's both interesting and sad to see how litigious the comic book industry is. In order to stay in business and to only spend tens of thousands of dollars defending ourselves rather than the necessary millions (???), by agreement we aren't allowed to discuss the matter's details, but we have been under legal threats and attacks ourselves in the recent past. Who with, you wonder? What about? Well what do you think of the cool fictional photoshop work below? Neat, huh? Yeah, child's college fund and an entire retirement savings worth of "neat". It's quite inspiring illuminating to see super-heroes® in action first-hand.]
YouTube’s reign of video dominance may be coming to an end, as The Pirate Bay is jumping into the video-hosting business, a fact that is sure to irritate every music and movie company on the planet. What will separate The Video Bay apart from YouTube? A total disregard for copyright. Whereas YouTube doesn’t waste any time pulling down videos, The Video Bay will laugh it off and basically say, “Come and get us.” The Video Bay is currently undergoing beta-testing, which is open for any and all. There isn’t much to see quite yet and the place is full of bugs, but you can expect to hear a lot about this site in the months, and years, to come. From BBC:
TBP founder, Peter Sunde, announced The Video Bay to the Open Video Conference in New York. In a statement on the site, Mr Sunde said the service would use the latest HTML 5 features. “More specifically the audio and video tags with the ogg/theora video and audio formats. “This site will be an experimental playground and as such subjected to both live and drunk encoding, so please don’t bug us too much if the site isn’t working properly,” he said. Although the site is in its early stages, a preview showed a number of copyright music videos available for viewing in the navigation sidebar. The move will be seen by some as provocative, given that the founders of The Pirate Bay were found guilty of breaking copyright law and were sentenced to a year in jail in April, though they are currently still free men.
I grew up playing Sierra On-Line adventure games, so this latest discovery has my geek cells excited. Martin Kool of Sarien.net has hacked the original source code of a few classic Sierra games, allowing players to play from their browser in a multiplayer environment. What does that mean? It means you’ll see more than just your character navigating around a room looking for clues. You’ll also see other players moving around, doing similar activities. When they look at an object, you’ll see their results. In this way, everyone playing can glean information from other players to better tackle puzzles. A great idea with awesome implementation. But how much longer till this is shut down for copyright issues?
Currently, Sarien.net offers Space Quest I & II, Police Quest, Leisure Suit Larry and The Black Cauldron.
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