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Lawrence Lessig On Hollywood's Attack On Fair Use
Richard Koman writes: "Tim O'Reilly and I interviewed cyberspace lawyer Lawrence Lessig about the law and P2P for O'Reilly's OpenP2P site. He makes some great points about the legal and investment climate for P2P (the RIAA's goal is to "guarantee that no venture capitalist invests money in new modes of distribution unless Hollywood signs off") and the full-bore attack on fair use in the DeCSS case (the DMCA says "you cannot crack copyright protection schemes even if your purpose is to allow you to have fair use of the underlying material.")" I disagree a bit with Lessig's statement on the second page about why we don't have book licenses - I think it's because the legal system refused to enforce them, not because the book industry thought it was futile. But overall it's definitely a good read.
There was originally a balance struck with copyright. People accepted the rights of authors to have control over their work for a period of time (then 14 years). This allowed the author (and publisher) to make money from his work. In return, at the end of that period of time, the work would become part of the public domain, free for all to use. That bargain is long dead, broken by publishers. They continually lobbied for more control and longer copyright terms, and they got them. Now copyrighted works don't go into the public domain for at least 70 years, and that's only if the author dies right after creating the work. Is it any wonder that many people have no respect for copyright anymore? We haven't seen anything go into the public domain for decades! We're going back to the times before the Statute of Queen Anne in Britain where publishers had perpetual copyright control over works they published. That was stopped by the Statue of Queen Anne, and US courts acknowledged that copyright is a privilege, not a right, and that there were no perpetual rights granted to authors or publishers for control over the works they create and publish.
Today, publishers are still seeking perpetual control over the works they publish. People should understand that if there is to be a bargain, they must keep their end. Why should we create laws that serve only to enrich a few at the expense of the freedom of the rest of us? We grant copyrights so that authors will continue to create new works for us to enjoy and learn from. They will continue to create these things whether we give them 14 years of copyright protection or 1400 years of copyright protection. It is in the best interest of most of us if we limit the term to something reasonable such as 14 years. As things stand today, anything created in our lifetime will likely not go into the public domain in our lifetime. That's just not right and illustrates how the scales are tipped heavily in the publishers' favor. What we need now is copyright reform. We need to roll back the copyright term to the original 14 years (plenty of time to turn a very nice profit). There will be a fight. Highly profitable corporations do not give up money without a very big fight. But we need to restore a balance between the creators and the public. That alone could go a long way towards restoring respect for the copyright system and ensuring that the creators will profit from their creations. Yes, the publishing industry will have to resign themselves to not being able to milk a creation for all eternity, but there's really no reason they should have ever had such a right to begin with.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
During the last few months in France, a debate has been inflamed by some authors and certain groups representing authors which feel that libraries are giving their work away for free, and that libraries should instate fee-based book-loaning. That would be, I think, a quick shut-down of one of the simplest sources of free information.
Wordnik, a dictionary project which aims to collect
Unlike most people on Slashdot, I am neither pro-Napster nor anti-copyright. IMHO, it would have been disastrous in the long term if Napster had been allowed to spread unchecked because once technology to transfer music easily from PCs to Home Audio Systems to Cars to Personal Devices was perfected [5 to 10 years], no one would ever buy music again and it would kill music as a profession except for a few heavily marketed superstars (Britney Spears, N'Sync, etc) and truly talented groups (Pink Floyd, U2, Metallica, etc) in certain genres who could still make money touring. Similarly with eBooks, a serious disincentive for books being published has been the copyright issues and the creation of a growing underground of book pirates who trade eBooks similar to how MP3s were traded until Napster, Gnutella and Scour.net opened it up for the masses. Few authors are comfortable with spending months or years writing a book just for others to distribute it for free and prevent them from putting food on the table.
On the one hand the "Digital Rights Management" technologies being created to combat these threats to copyright are ominous. Microsoft plans to support digital rights management at the OS level very soon and has started making moves in that direction while hard drive manufacturers have considering adding hard drive copy protection to all systems built in future and Intel has flirted with copy protection for monitors and other display devices. All of the aforementioned technologies are invasive, distasteful and prevent users from exercising their rights to fair use of copyrighted or non-copyrighted works.
Also recent legal wranglings aimed at protecting copyright have robbed consumers of rights that they have had or should have such as the The Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In the same vein certain rulings against opponents of the RIAA and MPAA such as the $118 million dollar ruling against MP3.com or the ruling against 2600.com are ridiculous.
So my question is this: Is there a middle ground?. On the one hand I am opposed to piracy and "Information Wants to Be Free" has always been a poor justification for piracy in my opinion (whether software or music) but on the other hand it is clear that something has to be done soon about the way in which consumer rights are constantly being eroded. Basically I believe that until advocacy against the RIAA, MPAA and other copyright cartels begins to counter their arguments with reasonable points that can benefit both sides, we are doomed to continue in this downward spiral. As long as our arguments boil down to "I want free shit" or "No encryption can't be hacked", we will constantly be at war with the RIAA & MPAA and since they have more money (and thus better lawyers) than us, they will win.
Grabel's Law
About thirty years ago it became possible and easily accessible for anyone to copy an entire book on a copier. They could then bind it and voila, a "free" book. This did not herald the end of the publishing industry. My opinion is that, although easy to do, it's not worth the time/cost of doing. It may be that this ability reduced the cost of books to consumers; if a book cost $34,000 one might consider copying and binding it.
Twenty years ago it became fairly simple for someone to copy software using cracking utilities or just a disk copy. Did this begin the downfall of the software industry? At that time, the software industry believed it would but ultimately people continue to buy software. Most readers of Slashdot can find a crack for a demo program and use it. But your cracked demo usually is somehow not quite as good as the purchased version -- there might be stray lines in some graphics or some driver is not supported. It's usually easier and cheaper in terms of time to buy the CD, stick it in and hit install than modify some DLL with a hex editor. Again it is likely that the ability to copy puts downward pressure on software prices which is good for consumers.
The most recent developments make it possible, for example, to obtain almost any song and play it at near-CD quality. Woe to the music industry! Of course using Napster you have to find the song, wait in a queue for your download to begin, then hope that your song wasn't encoded by some ninny at 20kbps or stops before the last 20 seconds. If, on the other hand, you could say "Stairway to Heaven" into your remote control and 5 seconds later it downloads (and can be replayed ad infinitum) to your Sony MP3 Jukebox thanks to your gigabit connection to Columbia House wouldn't it just be easier to pay $.003?
My point is that the result of these new technologies has not and will not result in ruination of an industry. Instead it will result in lower consumer prices and _possibly_ lowered profits for some copyright-based industries. The RIAA and Hollywood have no right to force profit-protection legislation on consumers. They simply need to make it easier for consumers to buy music/video than to copy it.
Has anybody else been reading User Friendly's recent satire of Hollywood thought suppression? Good stuff, and I'm glad to see the Lessig interview for a serious look at the same subject.
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This is not my sandwich.
Uh oh...Lessig fell for the "Read Aloud" "right" in the eBook. I think we covered that a while ago and concluded that it was actually phrased ambiguously and should have been more like: "This book is not able to be read aloud by a text-to-speech program".
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
. . . the fundamental problem of what is wrong with DMCA, and why strong-IP guys like myself are opposed to it, is that it doesn't protect the plaintiff's intellectual property. In fact, the upshot is that it provides patent-like protection for anti-circumvention "technologies" (an overly generous term in many cases) with unlimited term and virtually unlimited scope.
The irony of the DeCSS case is that the subject matter that was labelled contraband was not written or conceived by the plaintiffs, but rather by the defendants! It was the original intellectual property of the defendants that was restrained. This is why the First Amendment is so clearly implicated in this case.
But now the real danger is that the recording industry has succeeded in its objective, which as Hillary Rosen (president and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America) said, is to guarantee that no venture capitalist invests money in new modes of distribution unless Hollywood signs off.
This is the guts of it. Media companies don't like the potential that new technologies have for distributing content (and excluding them from the supply chain). So what's their strategy been? Armies of lawsuits to make sure that a) anyone with a good idea has to waste their time defending a legal case and b) anyone who wants to fund a good idea won't - because they don't want to get involved in a legal case.
Ironically, the most dangerous and subversive tools are the ones written by individuals or small teams with zero funding - Gnutella, OpenNAP and Freenet.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.