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Copyright Law for the Future: Control & Creativity
ablair writes: "MacSurfer is linking to a truly excellent article by Stanford Law's Lawrence Lessig, on the copyright balance between Control & Creativity. A must-read for those interested in everything from the RIAA-mp3 battles to the way GPL & BSD Licenses should be."
Or maybe even a few scientists at CERN...
Cheers,
Ian
I don't think so. I believe that purely voluntary, uncoerced payment could not only be adequate, but better for both the users and producers of information products. Traditionally, publishers and retailers took the lion's share of income, so considerably smaller revenue will mean equal or greater profit for the creator. In other words, if you don't make the creators force you to pay them, you can pay them a lot less and they'll be just as well-rewarded and encouraged to make more good stuff.
I do believe that it has to become easier and more efficient, which is why I've worked on a system for more efficient donations. Processing donations is a lot easier than processing verified, mandatory payments, and the issues that kill a micropayment system aren't really a problem for a microdonation system. With an open system like this, you can implement the allocation process in all sorts of interesting ways, such as integration with what you choose to view, or to file for repeat viewing. Convenience is absolutely key, and crufty web services like Amazon Honor System are just not going to cut it for allocating a dozen nickels and pennies per hour.
However, it would be irresponsible to drop copyright before this concept is proven on the market. It can be tested perfectly well without changing copyright law. The competitive advantage of a free (gratis) product is obvious, and if people will pay, free products will displace products with a mandatory cost. If they pay more for free (libre) products, then these will be the best strategy for profit-seeking developers.
Eventually, copyright would just seem pointless. But this can only happen when the users take responsibility for rewarding good products.
"Reprinted with the permission of Random House"
Ironic, huh?
In the article, Lawrence Lessig calls Richard Stallman "the philosopher of our age." Only if the majority of the community can look beyond "GNU/Linux", "GPL sucks," etc. and see the deeper issues as Professor Lessig does...
Free Software: the software by the people, of the people and for the people. Develop! Share! Enhance! Enjoy!
Broke college students and an entire culture raised on broadcast radio, tv and the premise that media and entertainment is free.
.
Think about this example - think back to the days where a personal cd player cost around $150, sucked batteries etc, etc. Think of what the CD industry was before Columbia House (and scamming their ass hard). It sucked, virtually nobody had cds - why? well, because the ability to play awesome quality music / not have to ff, etc, etc wasn't worth the cost.
I have no idea how the entertainment industry can think that their attempts at DRM, etc can compete with "free" or at the very least "cheap alternative" sources like the radio or the cds burned by polly the pirate. You can't change the mindset of people who were raised to turn on the tv / radio and tune to whatever station and get a program without any hastle.
The cat is out of the bag, more people use the "illegal" services than use the legal - hell - if you use a commercial DRM supporting player - i.e. rio 600 - there is actually value lost - the interface is a fucking pain compared to how i get files to my rio volt (cd mp3 player). Not that diamond could ever make software worth a damn anyways (hw kicks ass), but still . .
Now the video industry has something that actually might save their ass - DVD special features, the fact that data speeds over the net are slow and the lack of a comercial player for DIVX on your TV - which are the only things that are preventing DIVX from being in almost every household.
Quality sure as hell isn't stopping people - the new 4.12 divx codec looks damn near dvd quality at full screen if postprocessing is set to max (needs a good box tho, about 1 GHz, damn).
What can I say, this isn't a financial war they are fighting, but one against a mindset, and they are approaching it the wrong way.
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I think Lessig is trying to apply prior situations to current situations in a way that will not work at all. When talking about cable TV or the player piano rolls, Congress had the ability to restrict use or distribution of these products without too much difficulty. Also, both cable and piano rolls required resources to produce and distribute.
P2P sharing is a completely different idea though, in the digital world, it becomes much harder to track distribution of products, and much easier to distribute, thus making it much harder for Congress to regulate P2P. If one tried to force a P2P service to pay those industries whose products it distributes, how would one keep track of all the media and account for it with the volume that goes over each network, or even the bigger problem, how would a service stay in business when it has to pay for transactions when there will most likely be other services out there which will not comply for various reasons. It's not possible for Congress to simply legislate on the internet, any legislation enacted in the spirit which Lessig is talking about would require a complete overhaul of how we interact with the internet in some way, most likely infringing on free speech as well.
As every type of media becomes digital and easily able to be distributed, its not possible for Congress to deal with digital mediums as it did with player pianos. I'm afraid that this is one situation where we are going to have actually tread new ground instead of relying on previous cases. I'm not sure exactly how we should legislate internet distribution, or even if we should, but I know that any effective or meaningfull legislation won't be based on any previous copyright ideas.
In the US, the Law gets its authority from democratically elected government. The Government gets its authority from the people, as conveyed through the democratic process (voting). If the Government has control over the information the people have access to, then they have the ability to manipulate people's ability to make an informed voting decision. This corrupts the very democratic process from which the law gets its authority.
This article should be required reading for anybody interested in intellectual property. No black-and-white stuff here. But the people who most need to read it, and the ones that I sincerely hope will, are the seven old men and two old women who sit on the U.S. Supreme Court.
however, is the fact that courts must use previous cases to establish the legality of any law. Most courts, except for the Supremes, are unwilling to decide on new territory or set new precendents, simply because they are likely to be reversed on appeal. (looks bad on the resume and all).
Mr. Lessig has written an interesting article, and I think it was worth reading.
Still, I think he has misses the point. He says (I paraphrase) that the internet has the possibility to fundamentally change the system, but that we are simply using it to recreate the old system on a larger/different scale.
Cable television, he also says, was the first Napster. But I think both of these are completely wrong.
As has been pointed out before, and as bears pointing out again, Napster was a file sharing service which allowed people to share files they already had on their computers. Napster itself generated no content, not even content copied from other providers. It was not a one to many medium, as cable television certainly is.
As far as I see it, Napster was really a search engine -- but one with an interesting usage agreement. "We will tell you where to find music on other people's computers, but only if you run our software and agree to share your music." And you didn't even really have to share your music, if you didn't want to! Napster worked because of the fact that a lot of people thought it was a really cool idea, not because they provided better content.
How would a compulsory licensing scheme work for something like this? It wouldn't at all. It doesn't even apply. Are you going to say that facilitating the transfer of a music file over the internet, even if that file doesn't pass through your server, and even if both parties may in fact already legitimately have license to the file makes you subject to a fee (although, apparently, this is what the courts decided)? Otherwise you're left with charging everyone who uses the service for files that are downloaded from their machines.
Furthermore, the internet has the capability to be as many things as people desire simultaneously. It is not limited to reconfigured one-to-many offerings and commercial ventures. Nor is it limited to free exchange of ideas. Internet bandwidth is not unlimited, but neither is the "bandwidth" of a person. The beauty of a computer network is that it is an on demand service, and one person can seek out whatever he or she wants.
Cable television, radio, film: all of these are bound by issues of streaming. There are a limited number of TV or radio stations, even on cable or satellite, and they all broadcast only in real time. Therefore, a decision has to be made regarding what is available. Likewise, movie theaters can only show a certain number of movies per day, and so they must choose to show those they think will make the most money.
But look at video rental! Video rental is more like a file-sharing model: you can get whatever movie you want (as long as you can find the right video store), and you can watch it when you want. Movies come from many different studios and directors, and video stores facilitate finding them. Unlike non-commercial file-sharing, there is copy protection built into the movies, however, so that when you want to watch one, you have to pay for the privilege.
I can envision a real-world/napster hybrid: "Here is a list of club members and the movies/CDs/books they own. If you are a member of the club, you have the right to request a copy of any movie/CD/book owned by a club member. If more than one member owns the work, you may choose which member to ask. Having received a copy of the work, you are now considered to own it also and may receive requests for copies." I am pretty sure that there are clubs like this for trading, especially, DVDs.
Finally, while there may be much more commericial content available electronically than before, it is also easier than ever for an individual to create his own content.
The internet is not a book, it's paper.
Phil
We're wanted men. I have the death sentence in 12 systems!
Rip, mix, burn.
After all, it's your music.
Apple, of course, wants to sell computers. Yet their ad touches an ideal that runs very deep in our history. For the technology that they (and of course others) sell could enable this generation to do with our culture what generations have done from the very beginning of human society: to take what is our culture; to "rip" it--meaning to copy it; to "mix" it--meaning to re-form it however the user wants; and finally, and most important, to "burn" it--to publish it in a way that others can see and hear.
What this guy is defending is that everyone should have the right to "backup" their music and re-master it as they see fit.
Thats a good idea.
What the article completely misses is that that is not what people do with ripped audio. Of course groups like the RIAA shouldn't [and for the most they don't] crack down on ripping software. Its the P2P stuff they should kill and for several good reasons
1. P2P takes up a huge amount of bandwidth, specially at schools where people might actually try todo research or otherwise need bandwidth for positive goals
2. P2P sharing is illegal for the most part since what people "share" is copyrighted material.
3. P2P clients are often buggy and wreck computers or install Gator clients! evil!
Its one thing to be allowed to rip audio [which you are] and its quite another to be prohibited from "sharing" it [which you are].
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
...because he clearly doesn't understand it, although it's probable that no one does, really.
Lessig proposes some rather reasonable approaches to balanced protection for various types of creative work.
I think his proposal for software is completely unworkable, although I'm very glad I read it, because the reasons *why* it's unworkable led me to some interesting ideas.
Lessig proposes a five-year term, renewable once (okay so far) with registration required. A total ten-year limit is eminently reasonable based on the short lifespan of software, in fact, ten years may arguably be too long. Where I see a problem is with Lessig's requirement that software be registered to obtain copyright protection.
Which version do you have to register? All of them? Software isn't like a painting, or a book, which you write once and never substantially modify. Sure, a second edition of a book may have some typos fixed, but I've never seen the author go back and make corrections to flaws in the plot (even if they should :-) ). Bug fixes and feature enhancements, minor and major, mean that software never really stops changing (until it stops being used). Because of this, our current system of automatic copyright protection is really important for software. It means that every time I go back and modify some of my code, the result is copyrighted just like the original. Even if I go modify some open source code, my changes are automatically copyrighted as well, which is very important for open source (although it introduces some almost intractable complexities as well, which lead to the FSF's suggestion that the copyright to GPL'd software be assigned to them).
So how would registration of software work? Would the copyright office have to run a giant CVS server? Security would be very hard. Then again, maybe that would be a good thing; copyright registration would require disclosure of source to the government and concomitant risk of public disclosure. Or maybe the CVS tree should even be public: the only way to obtain legal protection against copying would be to effectively publish the source code? The ramifications of that idea are interesting. It would certainly be a huge boon for the progress of the art and science of software engineering -- want to see how the scheduler in Windows XP compares to that in Solaris? Go look. Programmers would be able to take the best ideas from other programmers as long as they just use the insights and don't copy the code -- just like authors and musicians do.
OTOH, mandatory disclosure of code might also destroy the software industry entirely. Need an operating system? Just download a copy of the AIX source code and build it yourself. No need to pay IBM unless you get caught, and catching everyone would be very difficult.
What has become clear to me, at least, is that software is *fundamentally* different from books, movies, paintings and inventions. Maybe our real problem isn't in the ways we apply copyright and patent law to code, maybe the real problem is that we need an entirely different approach. We need to find a way to provide balanced protection that can permit individuals and companies to benefit from the cost and effort of software development. Stallman would have programmers be like bricklayers or lawyers; paid by the hour for services rendered, but IMO that also stifles some kinds of software development. Games are the common example, but who knows what other kinds of high-risk, high-reward types of software there might be, where there has to be a good chance of a massive payoff before anyone is willing to take on the challenge. Stallmans's ideal only works in situations where either (a) the software can be created piecemeal, and the pieces can be sufficiently useful to someone willing to pay for them or (b) there is some way of organizing and collecting from a large group of beneficiaries (street performer protocol maybe? I'm skeptical).
Lawrence Lessig is definitely one of the major thinkers of our day on the issues of Intellectual Property in the Internet age, and even he doesn't have any idea how to deal with software. It's a hard problem because code is so *many* different things, all at the same time. It's not like anything the law has dealt with before.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Natural copyright is more important for software than it is for a lot of other media because it is so often revised (though some code has a longer fixed life, like various versions of malloc() which have been around and unchanged forever because they need to be predictable).
It is still important for other works, too, though. As an author, you may have to show several revisions of your book to your editor ("take out the scene with the dead horse and make the lighthouse worker a spaceman") before it is accepted for publication. All of these versions need automatic copyright protection.
Natural copyright also helps deal with the issue that corporations tend to have more money to throw around than individuals. What if you are dirt poor, and truly can't afford to register your copyright? There are actually people out there in the US who cannot afford to pay anything whatsoever. They should not be denied copyright protection.
Why is Grand Theft Auto a much more serious crime than Reckless Driving?