I’m confused. I’m not sure Peterson’s explanation of what happened here is accurate. If Peterson wrote the talk, he still holds the copyright on it, unless he transferred it to someone else. As he plans to give the presentation this year, it doesn’t sound like transferred his rights,Tom wrote: ↑Wed Aug 04, 2021 4:38 pmI assume that any copyright issues were resolved prior to the September 14, 2020 Lethbridge YSA stake FHE presentation of the same name. I wonder why he doesn’t mention that presentation in his blog post.I prepared the remarks that I’ll present on Friday (again, “Sincerity and Reality”) at FAIR as a presentation for BYU Education Week that I expected to follow fairly closely after the 2020 FAIR conference on “Variety and Complexity.” But, owing to the coronavirus pandemic, the 2020 BYU Education Week was made entirely virtual. I recorded the talk under the auspices of BYU Continuing Education for eventual release online. And then came a problem: The talk was already recorded, with its images, and we came up against an intractable copyright issue that we could not resolve in time for it to be broadcast. (The apparent holder of the copyright could not be located.)
So we eventually decided not to put that talk online. And then the brilliant idea came to me of presenting it this year, at FAIR 2021. So that’s what I’m going to do.
A person who records the talk doesn’t get any IP in the talk. Whoever created the visuals would have a copyright on the visuals. But the act of recording, in and of itself, doesn’t transfer any rights in the works that are recorded.
Now, if someone (presumably with permission) combined Dan’s talk and the visuals into an audio visual presentation, that could be a new work, with the person who created it having a copyright on the new work. Like, if Dan provided Res Ipsa Productions with text and images and we produced a presentation of the talk (complete with POW side effects), absent any agreement to the contrary, I think we would hold a copyright in the presentation we created, but not the text or the individual images.
But it sounds like Peterson made a new recording of the talk through CES. So why not use different visuals? And does Peterson usually have some guy that’s hard to track down do production work for him? And why wouldn’t he structure the deal so that he ended up with the copyright to a production of his own talk?
I don’t think there’s anything shady about it. It’s just odd.
