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The summary says most of the challenges are NOT about public libraries, but about school curriculum. One example being ELEMENTARY school having kids read about a transgender child.

However, many of books in the ban list are ABOUT PUBLIC LIBRARIES. You are looking at only one link (with top 10 in 2016 ban books) and then conflate it to the whole list (a bigger list link or better yet here).

Multiple books on the list were about transgender children, presenting that as normal.

Hmm... Half of the top 10 ban list are about LGBTQ, and two of them are about transgender child. That's only from the "top banned in 2016" list. I don't disagree that these books shouldn't be read by children "alone" but rather being approved by their parents. However, you are conflating (again) the number of books about trangender children in order to support your bias.

If you (and anyone) really want to check on banned books from public schools & libraries (mostly in Canada & USA), here is the list of those books in different years. Below, I listed what

From the link:
2015-2016 -- 2 out of 45 books (7 LGBTQ books)
2014-2015 -- 0 out of 33 books (4 LGBTQ books)
2013-2014 -- 0 out of 28 books (0 LGBTQ book)
2012-2013 -- 0 out of 44 books (3 LGBTQ books)
2011-2012 -- 0 out of 42 books (4 LGBTQ books)
... and so on ...

It could well be argued that parents shouldn't be putting their children through multiple surgeries and heavy doses of unnatural hormones to turn a boy into a girl or vice versa, in the vast majority of cases. That's the kind of thing a person ought to decide for themselves, making an informed decision when they are an adult, some would say.

I wouldn't go that far. You are making an assumption about what the content of the book is. You are making an assumption how transgender children become. If you haven't read the book, you have no right to assume about parents making/allowing the decision. It is similar to someone writing a review on a restaurant where the person has never been to before. The person is unqualified to write criticism about the restaurant.

I don't care to argue for or against on any of these issues, but they are certainly issues on which reasonable people may disagree. On such issues, perhaps the government schools shouldn't be forcing this stuff on grade-school kids. If you want to teach your kids that it's normal to chop off a little boys penis, you can do that, but I don't see that you have a need or a right to force that on every other family.

I agree that government should never force the kind of book reading on kids, but I disagree that you or a few people have the right to forbid others to read the book either (ban from public libraries). If you look at the list of banned book, you should at least see that this is NOT about public school ONLY but rather on the whole society in the sense of "family" or "children" relation.

In conclusion, I agree on the part that no one should have the right to force or forbid on kids reading books. The decision should be on their parents. Thus, some books should be banned from public schools but no book should be banned from public libraries.

Take a look through the 7,000 Minecraft books on Amazon, a large number of which are novels and not strategy guides. The licensed Minecraft books by Scholastic have 17 million copies in print, and boosted their revenue by 2%. Plus there's the Minecraft: Story Mode game by Telltale that has additional chapters coming after the initial 6 -- though I don't know if that actually means it's selling well or not.

I recently finished reading The Profiteers. About how Bechtel worked within and manipulated government policy to make a buck. I'm sure that in a few decades, someone will write about various players in the information business and how they played public policy and Congress to create an economic environment conducive to their success. New century, old game.

Both Amazon and B&N allow ebook lending.

As for second hand ebooks, you might want to read this

The question is -- why do you think Amazon needs to force these prices, then? If publishers are charging too much, people won't buy, and the publishers go out of business, making room for those with better pricing.

On the other hand, what if customers are willing to pay the extra $5 or $10 or $50 for a particular book? If the publisher is okay making money at the prices it selects, why do we need Amazon to intervene in the free market?

Amazon is striking back after the price-fixing business between Apple and the Big 5 that was intended to break Amazon's dominance in the e-book market.

Hachette is also well known here in its home country France for its frequent and long-standing collusion with the state. It holds an all-but-in-name monopoly over most schoolbooks, the purchase of which is mandated by the public education system. In 2011 the European Commission started investigating Hachette, Penguin, Georg von Holzbrinck, Harper&Collins and a couple other big publishers for abuse of dominant market position and anticompetitive practices, especially in the electronic book market. Hachette also is forcing DRM onto e-book authors even in their outside deals with other publishers.

Your link is a dated article. At least two years old. It doesn't even realize that the kindle is supported by Overdrive.

Counties are forming partnerships with adjacent counties to expand their collections. (I can borrow for four different county libraries, and two university libraries, all via my single county library card).

The publishers and Overdrive are coming around, making more and more of their catalog available in ebook form. The bitchslap they got from the DOJ and the slam dunk that Google scored have pretty much broken their will to get into abusive relationships with libraries.

When HarperCollins tried to limit lending to 26 lends, Overdrive dropped the publisher from their general catelog.
HC is by far the most restrictive.
The problem is that Counties don't have the clout to sue the publishers.

Regular paperbacks are generally of noticeably higher quality than "Mass Market Paperbacks" (which are the small-ish versions sold in most supermarkets and such).

Not anymore.

'Asserting that the K-12 education market is “ripe for disruption" Joel Klein, former New York City schools chancellor, now executive v-p at News Corp. and director of Amplify, its education unit, offered a presentation of Amplify’s business model and plans to release hardware and software solutions`

No comment necessary ...

> So, does that officially make Evangelicals evil cultists? I mean, trying to get an end-of-the-world
> prophecy started is usually the domain of villains...

well, is it ALL evangelicals who think this way? Probably not. On the other hand, I saw some scary statistics about the Christian book market: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/20/christian-rapture-fiction-sf-apocalypse
and
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blogs/soapbox/article/2689-jesus-and-the-bestseller-list.html

Both of which indicate that Christian fiction and specifically apocalypse fiction is BIG business. "There's close to, if not more than, $1 billion in retail sales of Christian books unaccounted for by these lists."

That is a lot of books, and kind of frightening.

Okay let me lay this down clearly because you're trying to mislead people here.

Apple charges 30% for two different thing.

1) App purchases. Eg. To buy Office for iOS
2) In-App purchases. i.e ebooks, or any service sold through the app, eg. Office 365 subscriptions.

For #1, for 30% they do payment processing (for which 3rd party processors charge about 2 to 5%), and promotion etc. which might
be worth 30% to some devs, but the problem is that they allow zero competition to the App Store itself. So if a third party wanted to do the same things as Apple but charge less, say 20%, they cannot. On Android/Play Store. THEY CAN. That is a big difference.

Coming to #2 is where your argument completely falls apart, as evidenced in the parent comments. Apple is not paying for Office 365 servers or hosting, nor for Netflix, nor for Readability nor for any of the apps' services that they either completel banned because they didn't pay the 30% tax for nothing to Apple, or forced to remove the link to the web site.

How is that not hurting developers?? Microsoft doesn't do #2, they only charge if you're using their infrastructure, zero if you're not.

Here's an assigment for you. Read the following links and come back and claim with a straight face that it's not hurting developers.

http://blog.readability.com/2011/02/an-open-letter-to-apple/
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/retailing/article/48130-apple-forces-e-tailers-to-remove-in-app-links-kobo-to-offer-html5-browser-ereader.html
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2011/02/apple_bans_sony_e-reader_app_a.html

No. It isn't. The only people who think that are those that have an axe to grind with Apple.

a) Pretty much every other app store out there has the same deal and, more importantly

No, stop playing the "poor Apple" card.

This is about in-app purchases like Netflix subscriptions, ebook stores etc. Not 30% cut of apps.

Wrong - it's about the 30% cut. What in-app purchases does office have again?

Seriously, the only people who still bring this up (and mod it "Insightful" on /.) are those who are utterly ignorant of reality and just want to gripe about Apple (while ignoring all the other app stores operating under the same terms)

Wrong again.

From http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsstore/archive/2012/07/20/making-money-with-your-apps-through-the-windows-store.aspx [msdn.com]

I see nothing there that says that MS will not take their 30/20% cut. What I do see is allowing third party payment processors. I'd guess, based on the fact that the statement includes original payment for the app itself, that you wind up registering your payment processor through MS, and MS continues to take their cut. How else would they know (or care) if the payment provider is PCI compliant?

For example, this wouldn't happen on Windows Store.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2011/02/apple_bans_sony_e-reader_app_a.html

http://www.tuaw.com/2011/02/21/apple-rejects-readability-due-to-subscription-policy-where-wi/

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/retailing/article/48130-apple-forces-e-tailers-to-remove-in-app-links-kobo-to-offer-html5-browser-ereader.html

This wouldn't have happened on the Windows Store and probably not on Play Store as well(you can always sell an APK directly for sideloading or use one of the 3rd party stores on Android).

Sorry, but Apple apologists like you need to come up with a better defense of Apple than trying to muddy up things by saying "everyone else is doing it". They're simply not.

You make a grand statement for a store that's been up just a couple of months. No one knows what MS will or won't do with their store. What we do know is that MS's store makes Apple's App Store look like an open garden in comparison. So this entire set of "examples" are merely a red herring with a healthy dose of speculation and a set of blinders.

No. It isn't. The only people who think that are those that have an axe to grind with Apple.

a) Pretty much every other app store out there has the same deal and, more importantly

No, stop playing the "poor Apple" card.

This is about in-app purchases like Netflix subscriptions, ebook stores etc. Not 30% cut of apps.

Seriously, the only people who still bring this up (and mod it "Insightful" on /.) are those who are utterly ignorant of reality and just want to gripe about Apple (while ignoring all the other app stores operating under the same terms)

Wrong again.

From http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsstore/archive/2012/07/20/making-money-with-your-apps-through-the-windows-store.aspx [msdn.com]

Using your own billing system

Your app and service may already depend on a particular transaction provider or benefit from ties to other lines of business. Your customers want the trust and efficiency of a familiar, trusted transaction experience. You can use your own transaction provider within your app to provide the experience your customers expect.

If you are not using the Windows Store as your transaction provider, you will want to make sure that your app meets all of the certification requirements such as: Identifying the transaction provider to the user during purchase confirmation Prompt the user for authentication before processing the transaction Your payment processor must meet the current PCI Data Security Standard

For example, this wouldn't happen on Windows Store.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2011/02/apple_bans_sony_e-reader_app_a.html

http://www.tuaw.com/2011/02/21/apple-rejects-readability-due-to-subscription-policy-where-wi/

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/retailing/article/48130-apple-forces-e-tailers-to-remove-in-app-links-kobo-to-offer-html5-browser-ereader.html

This wouldn't have happened on the Windows Store and probably not on Play Store as well(you can always sell an APK directly for sideloading or use one of the 3rd party stores on Android).

Sorry, but Apple apologists like you need to come up with a better defense of Apple than trying to muddy up things by saying "everyone else is doing it". They're simply not.

In an ordinary, competitive market, a producer wholesales a good to multiple retailers and the retailers resell the good at an above-wholesale price. The wholesalers used to be barred from setting the price the retailers could price the good at though that's changed somewhat over the past 30 years.

In the eBook market, Amazon controls a majority chunk of the market since they were the first to provide a reader at a price most people were willing to pay. Prior to Amazon, Sony and a few other manufacturers were selling readers at substantially higher prices and few people were buying.

Amazon did something else. To promote the Kindle, they sold eBooks at below wholesale prices. Amazon is no stranger to this strategy as it views the loss on each sale as the cost of building their brand. Moreover, Amazon is in a position to underwrite losses in the eBook market with profits made from sales of other goods on their website.

The publishers view Amazon as a direct threat to their business. No business wants to have a single customer and if Amazon destroyed the brick and mortar business and destroyed any online competition, eventually the only place you could buy a book would be Amazon.

When Apple came along the publishers thought they might be able to build a defense against Amazon.

The irony of course is Apple is doing the exact same thing to software publishers that Amazon is doing to book publishers - squeezing them out.

Cory Doctorow's essay A whip to beat us with describes how DRM is screwing publishers and consumers alike.

Well, a quick google search of the numbers may be helpful:

The list of biggest companies shows that Verizon and ATT&T combined for a total revenue of about 230 billion. Meanwhile the the biggest publisher in the US only had revenue of about 2.5 billion, and the industry as a whole is much smaller than the telecom market. So who do you think can buy more influence in Washington?

You can thank Steve Jobs for the fully locked-down and now ubiquitous agency model that practically all publishers use.

"In the agency model, publishers set the price and designate an agent--in this case the bookseller--who will sell the book and receive the 30% commission. Adopting the model for e-books tends to mean e-book prices will rise, something both publishers and independent retailers applaud. Publishers believe low e-book prices devalue their books and cannibalize hardcover sales. Under the agency model once a price has been set it cannot be changed or discounted by the retailer and independent e-book retailers believe the higher prices of the agency model allow them to compete with big e-book vendors. " (from this article)

At least Amazon was selling ebooks for reasonable prices and encouraging competition in the market. Now we have a racket that is enforced on all sellers. Neither he nor Amazon have been able to dissuade publishers from using DRM.

Hell, there was a book just written about it by Christian Parenti called the Tropic of Chaos

The original post does not give enough information to understand the substance of this case. I have a masters degree from GSU so it perked my interest to understand better what this case is about. The case appears to center around a practice by some professors at GSU that use an E-reservation system to make certain papers available to students. When I was a grad student at GSU the professors simply copied the Harvard review documents or other documents and handed them out to us. Apparently this case has been filed due to the creation of a more formal, flexible process "and takes its name from the traditional library "reserve" model, where a professor makes a limited number of physical copies of articles or a book chapter available for students. Those copies were generally subject to permission, and proper reproduction fees were paid to the publishers." Below is more information.

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/43500-a-failure-to-communicate.html

I think there are viable alternatives for brick and mortar shops over just reducing their physical presence. Borders made some very bad business decisions at a time when many bookshops are attempting to change their business model. You may be interested to see how one bookshop (there are many doing the same thing) has evolved the business of selling dead tree books to fit with the modern era: http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blogs/soapbox/article/46020-hit-print--how-one-bookstore-uses-its-espresso-book-machine.html

This is a replay of the Amazon vs. Book Publishers' eBook war of a year ago. http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/41886-agents-largely-support-macmillan-some-angered-by-amazon-.html/ Amazon played hardball, dropping McMillan products in their $9.99 eBook pricing strategy (wherein they were losing money to gain control the market, while pressuring McMillan's $20+ print book pricing). The big print publishers were hardly the cash cows that Apple is, and Apple certainly noticed the game play. Amazon noticed how it turned out, too. It'll be interesting to see how two, keen marketing organizations handle this replay.

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/financial-reporting/article/44546-e-book-sales-jump-150-in-july.html

and possibly complete crap

"The $40.8 million in e-book sales generated in July came within $20 million of the July sales generated by the nine mass market paperback publishers that reported results to the Association of American Publishers. The e-book gains also came in a month where all print trade segments reported a decline in sales."

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/financial-reporting/article/44546-e-book-sales-jump-150-in-july.html

Wasn't many chubby ones there, http://pwbeat.publishersweekly.com/blog/wp-content/2007/05/200705291157.jpg

really only saw one that didn't look well above average even for the non-geek crowd. And that one was just a little old and beginning to get wrinkly.

Ummm, the techdirt article is based on an unsourced report - and if you look at the article that techdirt links to, it's a totally unsubstantiated piece of garbage, Are you really going to believe Amazon is losing money on every e-book transaction because of this nonsense article? No "facts" are provided, just unfounded conjecture.

This NY Times article says the same thing: "American publishers chafe over Amazon's pricing policy for the Kindle, under which it generally sells digital versions of best sellers at $9.99 - less than the wholesale price that Amazon pays for many of these books."

So does this article on Slate: "For a typical hardback that retails for $26--say, E.L. Doctorow's Homer & Langley--Amazon pays $13 and then sells it for $9.99 on the Kindle, taking a $3 loss on each sale." The same article also ran in Newsweek.

Here is an article at Publisher's Weekly: "That Amazon is currently treating the bulk of Kindle editions as loss leaders--items it either breaks even on or loses on to build market share in e-book sales and to fuel the growth of the Kindle--is one of the worrisome aspects of the current system."

Seems like a remarkable journalistic conspiracy by The New York Times, Slate, Newsweek, and Publisher's Weekly to cover up the truth. Or do you imagine that all these publications ran stories by all these reporters without making sure that the statements in them had sources?

When someone has pointed out that you've made a factual error, usually the best response isn't to get angry.

Publishers' Weekly is reporting that a request for a four-month extension by a group of authors has been approved.

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6654845.html

[this is] a rather unique publication in that it seeks to educate teenage youth about an array of issues ranging from privacy, free software, security and the impact of politics on personal freedom as it relates to the use of technology.

The parent speaks truth. Romance may not really have "the lion's share" of all fiction publishing, but in 2004 romance novels really did account for about 55 percent of all paperback book sales, totaling some $1.2 billion.

Here's another factoid for you armchair publishing-industry pundits to ponder: That same year, the Christian book market was said to be worth about $1.3 billion in net sales. You may not realize it, but there's a whole parallel market for Christian romances, Christian mysteries, and even Christian sci-fi and fantasy. And in 2004, it apparently brought in more money than romance books -- or, the equivalent of more than 55 percent of mainstream paperback book sales.

Remember these points, the next time you want to start mouthing platitudes like "only bad writers need to worry" and "the quality will rise to the top." When it comes to the business of writing, those writers who are most capable at reaching the market -- the real market, not the one they assume exists -- will be the most successful.

PRISM claims that free publication of science reports on the Web will undermine peer review.

Posted by Michael Fraase, 3/23/02 at 9:54:46 PM.

When elephants dance, its best to get out of the way. Thats exactly whats happening now as the entertainment industrythe recording, publishing, and motion picture industries, mainlyattempts a worldwide intellectual property power grab with two distinct targets. Think of it: a coup and a lock on all published content in the same year, amazing isnt it?

Target number 1 is the average customer: anyone who purchases software, an audio CD, an electronic book, or a movie on DVD. The entertainment industry sees customers as pirates, plain and simple. In their collective minds eye, we all have a wooden leg, eye patch, and a filthy talking parrot on our shoulder. While the Constitution grants customers certain rights with regard to copyrighted material, the entertainment industry very much wants to separate us from those rights.

Target number 2 in the sights of the entertainment industry are technology behemoths like Microsoft, Intel, IBM, and Apple. These companies, in the perverse worldview of the entertainment industry, make the toolscomputers mostlythat allow customers to practice their piracy.

Let me point out that I am a copyright owner, as is everyone else who has ever created a work in tangible form. Thats all authors, for short. Authors are almost never members of the entertainment industry club. The entertainment industry hates authors almost as much as they hate customers. Sometimes, especially when authors get uppity, the entertainment industry hates authors much more than customers. Until recently, authors have always been seen to be at least a marginal threat while customers were seen as merely necessary annoyances.

To complicate matters by at least an order of magnitude, the consumer electronics manufacturersthe companies that make stereos, VCRs, and DVD playershave aligned with the entertainment industry. At least some of them, and at least to some extent.

Unfortunately for usboth authors and customerswere likely to get squished as these elephants dance. The intent of the entertainment industry, believe it or not, is to outlaw personal computers. As security and cryptography expert Bruce Schneier explains it to Mike Godwin: If you think about it, the entertainment industry does not want people to have computers; theyre too powerful, too flexible, and too extensible. They want people to have Internet Entertainment Platforms: televisions, VCRs, game consoles, etc.

Copy-protected CDs

The recording industry is selling shiny plastic discs that contain music that cant be copied to or even played on some customers equipment. Philips, the owner of the CD format says these discs cannot be called CDs because they do not meet the standard of what a CD is. Sony, one of those weird hybrid companies that, as a member in good standing of both the technology and entertainment industries, finds itself on both sides of this issue says it cant guarantee the audio quality of these discs. The technology used to protect these discs sometimes prevents the discs from playing on computer CD-ROM drives, DVD players, and other devices specifically designed to play standard audio CDs.

Sales of recorded music are down 10% in the United States over the last year. The recording industry blames this downturn not on the economic recession, not on the crappy music that theyve released in the past few years, but on Internet piracy.

And its only going to get worse. Hilary B. Rosen, president of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) told Congress on 28 February 2001 that the practice of copy-protecting audio CDs would expand in the United States. If technology can be used to pirate copyrighted content, Rosen wrote in her response to a Congressional query, shouldnt technology likewise be used to protect copyrighted content? Surely, no one can expect copyright owners to ignore what is happening in the marketplace and fail to protect their creative works because some people engage in copying just for their personal use. Her pal, Michael Eisner, head of Disney, said he was tired of being finessed by the technology industry, whatever that means.

Unfortunately for Eisner, Rosen, Disney, and the RIAA, personal useand more importantly the rights associated with that use of copyrighted materialis exactly why copying of copyrighted material is not just allowed, but mandated by the Constitution. That some individuals illegally sell copied CDs or distribute copies of the music on the Internet is immaterial. In fact, fairly casual observation indicates that if customers are treated like criminals they will indeed begin to behave like criminals.

It has become common practice for music-loving computer owners to legally transfer audio CDs they purchase to .mp3 format files on their computers. The copy protection technology employed by the recording industry prevents such transfers by adding distortions to the music of the recordings. The industry insists that these distortions are inaudible when the disc is played on a standard CD player but result in pops when the music is transferred to a computer. In any case, its usually impossible to tell whether or not a disc includes the copy protection technology; in general, the copy-protected discs are not labeled.

Ironically, or probably not, .mp3 player manufacturers could easily defeat the copy protection technology, but they fear doing so would risk prosecution under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) which prohibits the bypassing of copy protection systems. In 1999, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that .mp3 players did not violate copyright law because customers have the right to space shift music they have purchased.

Moral rights

Interestingly, the act of using the copy protection technology is much more prevalent in Europe. Most European countries, unlike the United States, recognize an artists moral rights in the work they create.

Moral rights are a package of intellectual property rights granted to the original creator of a work, and include:

• The right of integrity;
• The right of attribution;
• The right of disclosure;
• The right to withdraw or retract; and
• The right to reply to criticism.

These moral rights are separate from the economic copyright that these days generally transfers from an author to a publisher and they can survive the author. The idea originated with the French, who believe that any creative work, by definition, includes the personality and character of the author. Where copyright is a property right that can be transferred, moral rights are part of the authors personality and character and non-transferable.

The first two moral rightsthe right of integrity and the right of attributionare especially important because they are codified as international law in the Berne Convention. The United States claims its intellectual property law complies with the Berne Convention, but this is just two instances where it doesnt.

The most important of these rights is the first, the right of integrity. Basically it prohibits an authors work from being distorted in any way that would harm the authors reputation and dates to the 1957 French law of droit au respect de l'oeuvre. Its a safe bet that a cross-reference over which the author had no control would be seen as a distortion of the work.

Seemingly, in Europe at least, an artist could make an argument against the production of a copy-protected version of her work on the sole basis of moral rights. Especially in the case of an audio CD to which distortion is intentionally added by the publisher.

In the United States, Representative Rick Boucher (D-Virginia) appears to be taking the point position in questioning the behavior of the entertainment industry. He believes that instead of using copyright to obtain fair compensation for the works theyve licensed, the copyright owner industryincluding the recording industryis attempting to exercise complete dominance and total control of the copyrighted work.

And just how much money does an artist receive in the form of royalties? Use Moses Avalons royalty calculator to figure it out.

A DMCA rewrite?

Representative Rick Boucher (D-Virginia) plans to introduce legislation that would regulateand maybe outright bancopy-protected compact discs. Boucher reportedly has concerns about customers buying copy-protected discs without knowing it and the compatibility problems inherent with the copy protection mechanism. In an interview with Wired News, Boucher said, The big problem initially is that consumers have no information that is complete and reliable about the disabilities which attend copy-protected CDs. These CDs will not play in DVD players, not play on personal computers (and) not even play on all CD players.

Boucher isnt talking about what kind of legislation he might introduce to accomplish his goal of protecting audio CD customers, and the possibilities are intriguing. At the simplest level, legislation may require copy-protected CDs to carry a warning label. At a more interesting level, Boucher may try to rewrite the DMCA. In fact, Boucher announced that he would introduce such legislation last July and reiterated his commitment to that approach in early March of this year.

Internet radio

Under the U.S. Copyright Offices interpretation of the DMCA, Internet radio may be a thing of the past. KFJC, KPIG, and RadioParadise may all be goners. Why is this tragic? Because any of these stations are orders of magnitude better than the sorry excuse for radio available on the traditional dial.

Internet radio is routing around an obsolete and unaccountable industrys safely padded environs and making a difference. Corporate radio sounds exactly the same from coast to coast because it is exactly the same. Sit and watch that website for a few minutes; if it doesnt nauseate you, itll damn sure hypnotize you.

Adding to the arsenal of tools deployed by big media is the Copyright Arbitration and Royalty Panel (CARP). CARP met secretly for the past several months and issued the CARP Report in late February. The keystone of this report is steep licensing fees for webcast music. Lets be clear: compulsory licensing is a good idea, consistent with the intent of copyright law. Usury licensing fees for small webcasters is not.

KPIG responded almost immediately with a plea to save the Pig from the digital slaughterhouse:

Independent webcasters such as KPIG are facing a grave threat to our existence. It may be an evil conspiracy on the part of the big record companies and corporate webcasters, ormore likelyits just a dumb mistake. In either case, KPIG could soon be liable for huge music usage fees ($5,000 - $10,000 per month) that would make it impossible for us to stay online. For background on the issue, see The Death of Web Radio? below and the SaveInternetRadio.org website.

Doc Searls, in his article Bizarre vs. Bazaar, eloquently sums up the combination of DMCA and CARP as the destruction of the Net as a commons and its replacement with a plumbing system for the distribution of content (a word hardly used in a shipping context before Big Media got all drooly over The Promise of The Net).

A brief history of copyright

Copyright, until this recent entertainment industry power-grab, has always been a delicatemaybe even precariousbalance between the rights of the author to benefit from his or her work for a short period of time and the rights of the rest of us to innovate and benefit from those works when they fall into the public domain.

The Constitution granted Congress the power to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries. Originally, the Copyright Act of 1790 established the limited times of copyright protection of 14 years with an option for the author to renew the copyright for an additional 14 years if he or she were still alive. That copyright term was good enough for the first 100 years of intellectual property in the United States. During the next 100 years, Congress extended the copyright term 11 times.

Certain uses of a protected work that would ordinarily be seen as infringing are specifically allowed for education, criticism, etc. These uses are allowed under the fair use provision. The core concept of fair use is that, in general, any use that does not exploit the commercial value of the original is permissible.

The fair use statute recognizes four criteria by which a use can be determined to be fair or unfair:

1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. The nature of the copyrighted work;
3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted wok as a whole; and
4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

William S. Strong, in The Copyright Book: A Practical Guide , provides an interpretation for working writers:

As a general rule a critic or reporter should not quote at any one point more than two or three paragraphs of a book or journal article, a stanza of a poem, or a solitary chart or graph from a technical treatise.

The Net allows ordinary citizens to exercise their fair use rights in ways never imagined by the entertainment industry. Subsequently, the reaction is to pressure innovation by extending the copyright term for any given work. In October, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case that will likely determine the legitimacy of the most recent copyright term extension, the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. This law extends the copyright term to the life of the author plus 70 years. In the case of works made for hire in which a corporation owns the copyright, the copyright term is now 95 years.

While one side of the entertainment industry was pushing, an activity that eventually became the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, the other side was pulling. That activity eventually resulted in the DMCA. Designed specifically to control the uses that can be made of published works, the DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent copyright-protection technology. The result: the entertainment industry controls not only what you see and hear but the methods and devices with which you see and hear it. Even if the copy-protection is circumvented to enable the fair use of a published work, it is prohibited and deemed to be a criminal act.

Digital TV

According to Mike Godwin, digital television is the tipping point in the war between the entertainment and technology industries. Never mind that every time the entertainment industry shoots itself in the foot, the technology industry comes to its rescue. Remember in the 1970s when the movie industry was in a deep funk and that vampire Jack Valenti said that VCRs would kill it for good? As it turns out, the VCR revived the film industry. The film industry was failing not because of customer VCR usage but because they were putting out epically craptacular films. Just like the recording industry todaywhen in doubt blame those dang customers.

Anyway, Godwin says digital television is the flashpoint because its quality (technical, not artistic) is way too good and unlike DVDs, its unencrypted and has to stay unencrypted to be useful. Oh, and the pesky FCC regulations say that broadcast television signals must be sent unencrypted.

The purveyors of digital television think they have the answer: digital watermarks. They think thats the answer for the online distribution of music, and any other digital content as well. Unfortunately for them, in order for a watermark to be used to restrict copying of digital content, consumer devices used to play the content will have to have technology included thats capable of receiving those watermarks. That would require the cooperation of the technology industry, and that cooperation has not been forthcoming.

Godwin cites the theory of Edward Felten, a computer scientist at Princeton, holding that any sort of tagging system that is undetectable by the user will likely be easy to remove.

Digital rights management

Perhaps the weirdest part of all of this is that the technology industry is just as enamored of protecting intellectual property. Theyre just going about it in a minimally different way. Digital rights management (DRM) is the battle cry of the techheads. And where they differ from their entertainment industry brethren is the question of government mandates. The technology industry wants to lock up published content just as badly as the entertainment industry; they just dont want the government (or anyone else) telling them that they have to. Remember that the entertainment and technology industries both lobbied heavily in favor of the DMCA.

And then there are the schizoids, the companieslike AOL Time Warner and Sonythat are so large that they find themselves on both sides of the fence depending which way the wind blows.

SSSCA > CBDTPA

The Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA), kept on a leash but regularly trotted out by Senator Fritz Hollings (D-South Carolina), chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, can best be thought of as a sort of appendix to the DCMA. It is clearly designed to further extend legal protections for digital content owned or licensed by enormous media conglomerates.

According to the draft language of the bill, it would be illegal to create or distribute any interactive digital device that does not include and utilize certified security technologies approved by the Commerce Department. Even though MIT professor and RSA Data Security co-founder Ron Rivest has referred to the proposed legislation as the Digital Rectal Thermometer Security Act its really just mandatory corporate welfare for media conglomerates subsidized by the actual creators and consumers of intellectual property.

Felony penalties for distributing copyrighted material without the certified security technologies fully enabled or using a computer that circumvents those technologies are up to five years in prison and fines up to US$500,000.

Even worse, the proposed legislation calls for manufacturers of digital devices and the media conglomerates to collaboratively develop a copy protection system. If, after two years, they cant come up with a mechanism both industries can live with, the federal government will specify a standard. Hollings bill fails to include the actual creators or users of content in any of the machinations.

Should we be surprised that four of Hollings top campaign donors are media conglomerates?

Predictably, the politicians split along party lines over the SSSCA. Or, more accurately, the split is along the lines of entertainment industry campaign contributions. Democrats, who received US$24.2 million in contributions from the entertainment industry tend to support the idea of legislating the protection of copyrighted material in digital form. Republicans, who received a relatively paltry US$13.3 million in entertainment industry contributions usually oppose the SSSCA, claiming it is too interventionist.

In mid-March 2002, the other shoe dropped. Senator Hollings, better known as the Senator from Disney, transformed the SSSCA into the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA) and ceased his tip-toeing around. The CBDTPA is real legislation, and enjoys the support of five other co-authors: Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), John Breaux (D-Louisiana), Bill Nelson (D-Florida) and Dianne Feinstein (D-California). Just think, one more author and they could have been the seven dwarves. The CBDTPA would require all digital deviceseverything from fax machines to MP3 players and computers (as well as the software that runs on them)to be equipped with embedded copy protection schemes, approved by the federal government.

Whats most disturbing about this is relatively paltry sum it took to buy this legislation. During the 2002 election cycle, only two of the dirty half-dozen were in the top 20 recipients of soft money from the entertainment industry. So far in the 2002 election cycle, Hollings has received only US$19,000 and Stevens has taken only US$39,621. To get the real story, we have to look back several election cycles:

Senator

2002

2000

1998

1996

Total

Fritz Hollings (D-South Carolina)

$19,000

$32,750

$215,284

$43,300

$310,334

Ted Stevens (R-Alaska)

$39,621

$69,900

$109,521

Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii)

$49,852

$49,852

John Breaux (D-Louisiana)

$120,920

$120,920

Bill Nelson (D-Florida)

$47,550

N/A

N/A

$47,550

Dianne Feinstein (D-California)

$211,638

$211,638

$849,815

Theres no question why Fritz Hollings carried the water for this puppy, is there? But check those senatorial links in the table carefully because they tell the even bigger story of who the top contributing industries were for each politician. In every case, the entertainment industry scored big in the top 20 contributors for every Senator. And remember the 2002 campaign cycle isnt over yet. Not hardly.

So, how much does it cost to get your bill through the Senate? Looks to me like itll come in right around US$1 million.

Enter DigitalConsumer.org

The technology industry was quick to respond to the CBDTPA threat by launching DigitalConsumer.org and its attendant Consumer Technology Bill of Rights. Launched by two of the co-founders of Excite, DigitalConsumer.org is basically trying to protect the fair use rights of customers in digital media. The groups principles, outlined in the Bill of Rights are deceptively simple:

1. Users have the right to time-shift content that they have legally acquired.
2. Users have the right to space-shift content that they have legally acquired.
3. Users have the right to make backup copies of their content.
4. Users have the right to use legally acquired content on the platform of their choice.
5. Users have the right to translate legally acquired content into comparable formats.
6. Users have the right to use technology in order to achieve the rights previously mentioned.

The depth and breadth of support this lobbying group will receive remains to be seen. Some of the precepts are in direct conflict with the interests of some of the largest technology industry members. Microsoft, for example, almost certainly wants to be the digital rights management company of record and is none too keen on, say, items 2, 3, 4, and 5.

A solution

The solution is actually quite simple and requires only three steps:

1. Revert the term of copyright to 14 years, immediately and retroactive to all existing works.
2. Recognize moral rights in the works authors create, like every other civilized country on the planet. Make it immediate and retroactive to all existing works.
3. Prohibit any corporation from owning a copyright. Corporations create nothing; theyre consensual hallucinations and exist at our pleasure. I dont know about you, but Im not much pleased any more.

The basis of the problem is found in a single court ruling: Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. In this 1886 dispute, the U.S. Supreme Court found that a private corporation was a natural person under the Constitution and enjoyed the same protections as a citizen under the Bill of Rights. Corporations from that point forward were granted all of the rights and freedoms of a private citizen, yet none of the responsibilities. We made a mistake; hey, shit happens. Its not too late to fix it.

• Nice to see one of my comments get a 5 rating *WHEN SOMEONE ELSE POSTS IT*.

Bloody hell, that's harsh. Still, bearing in mind that Potter is plagiarised from several sources anyway, it's pretty apt for this discussion.

Oh, wait, I meant "allegedy plagiarised". ^W^W^W^W^W^W^W^W. I'm sorry, I must have been muggled, er, muddled up.