Slashdot Mirror
Siva Vaidhyanathan On Copyrights and Wrongs
Jason Haas writes: "While bad copyright laws such as the DMCA are having strong negative consequences, an even worse bill, the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA), is now before Congress. The CBDTPA would have radical effects upon many of the devices that we take for granted -- including the computer you are now reading this on. Bad copyright law is among the many things that we talked about. Siva Vaidhyanathan has a thing or two to say about this. An avid defender of peer-to-peer, Siva recently debated one of the MPAA's top lawyers on copyright law. A recorded version of this will be available on the web in late May.
Furthermore, he has written Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity, the first fully fleshed history of American copyright law ever to be put in book form. The cool thing about this book is that although it's about copyright law, you don't have to be a lawyer to understand it. Copyrights and Copywrongs covers American copyright law's origins in seventeenth century English law, tracks Mark Twain's efforts to extend copyright in the nineteenth century, and ends at the dawn of the twenty-first century with the rise of Napster and the DMCA."
Jason Haas: How are you?
Siva Vaidhyanathan : Stressed. I'm trying to finish my second book, which will likely be called "The Anarchist in the Library." Basic Books will publish it next year.
JH: That sounds like it may be of interest to Slashdotters.
SV: Probably. I lifted many of the insights from Slashdot posts. The book will be an examination of the battles between efforts to centralize information and efforts to decentralize information. It starts with peer to peer, and moves on to battles over encryption, the commercialization and regulation of science, the regulation of algorithms, and the efforts to fight terrorism using information policy. One of the most interesting stories I'm following is the role that encryption plays on both sides of these battles. Some efforts to centralize and control information rely on encryption. For example, DVDs, and some efforts to distribute and liberate information (Freenet) depend on encryption.
JH: Your book, Copyrights and Copywrongs, covers the evolution of copyright law from its origins to the late twentieth century. Where did you get the idea for this?
SV: From rap music. I grew up with rap music. But in the early 1990s I noticed the music was changing. Everyone else was paying attention to the lyrics -- the sexism and the violence and the anger. I was observing how the underlying body of samples were getting thinner, more predictable, more obvious, less playful. I had heard that there had been some copyright conflicts in 1990 and 1991. So I suspected that lawsuits had chilled playful and transgressive sampling. I was right. The courts had stolen the soul. And rap music is poorer for it. We used to get fresh, exciting, walls of sound that were a language unto themselves. By the mid-1990s, all we got were jeep beats and heavy bass.
JH: Are you dissing Ice Cube?
SV: [laughs] No! He's an O.G.! He and other artists are handcuffed by the law. From my research on rap, I got curious about the evolution of American copyright law and how it altered and got altered by the rise of different media technologies and forms of expression. So I traced the changes from the 19th century publishing industries through the rise of film and television, through blues, jazz, rock, and rap, and finally to the digital moment.
JH: The book ends just after the DMCA has gone into effect and Napster has begun its rise. What's happened since then?
SV: I knew that Napster would radically change the ways we interact with the copyright system. And I knew the DMCA would radically undermined the democratic safeguards that were built into our copyright system. But I knew that there was much more to this story. So I wrote an article for The Nation which defended Napster and peer-to-peer. I used this as the starting point for what would become the second book.
JH: In your first book, you refer to the DMCA as an example of what you call a "thick" copyright law. Can you explain the difference between "thick" copyright law and a "thin" law?
SV: I think the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) is misnamed. I don't consider it a copyright act. I consider it an anti-copyright act. Copyright is a fluid, open, democratic set of protocols. Conflicts are anticipated by Congress and mediated by courts. The DMCA wipes out the sense of balance, anticipation, and mediation, and installs a technocratic regime. In other words, code tells you whether you can use a piece of material. Under copyright, you could use a piece of material and face the consequences. The DMCA replaces the copyright system with cold, hard technology.
It takes human judgment out of the system and drains the fluidity out of what was a humanely designed and evolved system.
But getting back to thick and thin copyright.
One way to measure the thickness of a copyright law is to look at the duration of protection. If works enter the public domain before an author's life expectancy expires, then it's a thin and democratic system. If the duration of copyright protection is absurdly long and potentially indefinite, then it's way too thick.
JH: Senator Fritz Hollings' has introduced a new copyright bill to Congress, the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act. What what would it do? Is it another "thick" law?
SV: Yeah, it would be as thick as the Berlin Wall. But again, it's the extension of a technocratic control regime and a further abandonment of real copyright. All the attention this bill has received has generated an impressive movement for users' rights. People are finally waking up to the fact that their rights to make private, non-commercial use of material they buy is in danger. I think we should all thank Senator Hollings and the MPAA for sparking a revolt against copyright tyranny.
The title of the bill implies that by giving movie companies what they want, they will give us this wonderful library of streamed films, and we will finally have a reason to sign up for and pay for broadband. Paradoxically, nothing sells broadband like peer-to-peer, which is exactly what it would try to stop.
JH: CBDTPA would make a new computer ship with copy protection. What would it do to things like the iPod?
SV: The iPod would be hard to justify under the new law. But the real issue is the personal computer. The computer does three basic things: it does math, it stores data, and it copies data. A computer can't operate without those three basic functions. The law would limit these three basic functions, thereby cutting the Achilles heel of the PC. It would be just another appliance.
JH: It's that bad?
SV: Yes. If the law passes, I could send you a file that I made, but the machine would prevent you from making copies of just about anything else, including sound from web sites, video from web sites, etc. The law works completely for the benefit of big media companies that can afford to conform to the licensed encryption standards of the industry. Only the big boys could benefit from this law.
The law would only affect new stuff, so it'd be your next DVD players, your next TiVo, your next PC. The stuff you have now is going to do more and work better than any hardware that anyone could roll out after the law passes. But there's another, bigger issue. According to an early version, the bill covers not just hardware but software. Under it, you can't distribute a software package that has copy features. Furthermore, how in the world can anything released under the GPL have closed copy-protection standards embedded in it? It can't. It would make the GPL illegal, and future versions of Linux illegal. Even if Congress focused on hardware and excluded software, we all know that distinction is a matter of modular convenience and industry practice rather than a natural distinction. But nobody ever accused the U.S. Senate of understanding technology or thinking through long-term effects of tech policy.
JH: What can people do to stop this bill from passing?
SV: The first thing people should do is check out and support such organizations as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, digitalconsumer.org, and publicknowledge.org. The latter two are fairly new. And they are a sign that people are getting angry and active about these issues. I am particularly excited about publicknowledge.org, a public interest advocacy group that is coordinating and publicizing the concerns of a wide array of concerned citizens and groups.
But just as importantly, discuss this measure with your local librarians. Librarians are very active in opposing it. In 1998, very few groups actively opposed the DMCA, but librarians were at the front lines of its opposition. And once again, librarians are our best friends in this battle. And of course, the simple answer is, write members of the Senate Judiciary Community. [The American Library Association is a national organization of librarians that is active in defending freedom of information and access. The Senate Judiciary Committee can be found over here.]
If public anger doesn't stop this bill now, then we know that the corrupting power of the entertainment industries is at crisis level. The changes in copyright have not been great for our culture and our democracy. But I am optimistic that this new level of awareness and activism will make a difference.
Jason Haas retired from the computer industry in April 2001, and now juggles being a student, fatherhood, and progressive political activism.
This past year, Siva Vaidhyanathan has been an assistant professor in the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin, but is moving to New York University in the fall. The web page for his book, Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity, is at NYU Press.
I'm working on a large (HUGE) archiving project with a major library and the copyright issues are becoming increasingly stickly. All the librarians want to do is rip the cd's/lp's and stick them in a vault for protection. Then allow a (highly) limited number of users to access the ripped versions.
It's gone far enough that Hillary Rosen (of RIAA fame) has become involved. Woohoo.
This comment intrigued me, so I looked in Mr. Vaidhyanathan's latest book:
Table of Contets
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
I love his concept of Copyright as it should be, "open and fluid", of use, not abuse.
Finally, too, the first GOOD thing that EVER came out of somebody listening to Rap:
"JH: Your book, Copyrights and Copywrongs, covers the evolution of copyright law from its origins to the late twentieth century. Where did you get the idea for this?
SV: From rap music. I grew up with rap music
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts."
Slashdot should televise a conversation between this guy and RMS. This of course assumes placing the two close together doesn't cause reality to tear asunder.
SV: Probably. I lifted many of the insights from Slashdot posts.
The last chapter is called The Next Frontier: The DMCA, Frist Prost, Natalie Portman and The Battle For The Goatse Trademark. How Far Hot Grits?
That's a rather bizarre claim to make. Trespassing consists of being on somebody else's land without their consent, and usually with their explicit demand to go away. Creativity, on the other hand, need not involve tired, old rehashes of somebody else's material -- and when reuse is necessary, you can always ask first.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
At many times, I think to myself "These laws will never pass.. they have got to have at least some brain up there..."
/.land. We need to contact our representatives and let them know how we feel, but we need to do it intelligently and respectfully. No trolling allowed.
But as history has shown, they __CAN__ pass these laws. And they have. And unless we start a fund to buy ourselves our own politician, know that the RIAA and MPAA are saying "All your politicians are belong to us!".
We do need to be vocal about this, but not just in
Become a member of The Electronic Frontier Foundation or of one of the other sites mentioned in the article. Let your voice be heard!!
---
Strong with you, the force be. -Yoda
Wow, that point hit home. If we remove all the instances of human judgement from our social activities and interactions (like what we do with our spare time, music, movies, etc.), our society ceases to be a human, flexible, diverse society, and becomes a rigid, homogenous, and sterile machine which is merely comprised of humans.
If this legislation (and consequential social shift) sets the precedent for removal of the human factor in our societal system, where will it end?
I didn't like Brave New World.
Any sufficiently simple magic can be passed off as mere advanced technology.
There are intentional limitations to the power an author holds over his/her respective copyrighted works. These limitations exist to encourage other individuals or companies to expand and build upon those copyrighted ideas/works, thereby increasing innovation and promoting scientific development for the benefit of the public. The most important limitation on author control is the "fair use privilege". This right of the people specifically addresses the ability of an individual to use copyrighted works without consent of the owner to a reasonable degree. In Sony v. Universal City Studios; the U.S. Supreme Court stated that, "any individual may reproduce a copyrighted work for a 'fair use;' the copyright owner does not possess the exclusive right to such a use." This "doctrine of fair use" was initially created via judicial review, but has since been intentionally written into copyright law. Although this principle may seem to be counterintuitive to the overall premise of copyright, it is an extremely important link between the inventor who wishes to recieve payment for his work, and the public that wishes to access and make use of it. The U.S. Supreme Court remarks, ""the fair use doctrine exists because copyright law extends limited proprietary rights to copyright owners only to the extent necessary to ensure dissemination to the public." This is directly correlated to the goals of the constitutional explanation of copyright.
The obvious issue associated with this doctrine is how exactly to detirmine what is fair use as opposed to copyright violation. The law is not at all clear as to how a process is to be determined "fair use", but over the years many examples have surfaced. In general, criticism, comment, parody, new reporting, teaching, scholarship, research, or personal use such as time of format shifting are considered to be within the guidelines of fair use. Companies have in the past been relatively acceptant of the fair use clause within copyright law. As of late though, the tide has shifted as corporate profits have taken an ever increasing priority over public relations and proper customer satisfaction. Older ethical standards for customer rights have become less important to business executives then their efforts to increase profit margins and market domination.
Just how exactly media corportions lost site of the usefulness of this doctrine is beyond me. Think of video rental stores: They facilitate piracy. With two VCRs I could own every movie under the sun for about 5 bucks a pop. I don't. Both is it not worth the time to pirate, but it is also easier to pay the extra coin to ensure a good copy. People will pay to support media they like and to ensure good quality fun. They will NOT pay for over-priced crap forced down their throats.
Likewise (and perhaps more importantly), it is idiotic of the RIAA to assume that every person downloading an MP3 is a "diehard" pirate. Since the media companies have not ventured into this new market (digital music) they facilitate the piracy better than any P2P network could.
I will not support corporate theivery.
-----------------rhad
Slashdot needs to interview Natalie Portman.
A few months back there was a Justice Talking (a show on NPR) that debated the DMCA, Siva was the voice against it, an MPAA rep (sorry, I forget the guy's name) the pro voice. I was in attendence at it's recording.
Some of the interesting tidbits from that session that I can remember (this was in October I think, so my accuracy should be called into question):
Someone suggested that DeCSS may not exist if there were a DVD player available for Linux. The MPAA guy argued that all programs written for Linux must be open-sourced, which would compromise what is essentially their security-through-obscurity scheme of handling CSS. And Siva AGREED! Now correct me if I'm wrong - isnt it possible to write programs for Linux that are closed-source?
Tidbit #2 - Someone asked about making backup copies and their allowance under fair use. The MPAA rep countered that making a backup of a movie (whether it be video or DVD) is not permitted under fair use. A big look of shock on many people's faces after that statement.
Justice Talking used to keep RealAudio recordings of their shows on their site, but I never did see this session on the site in the weeks following the debate for whatever reason. (I suspect maybe it didnt appear because they played a 3-5 second clip from a musical version of DeCSS during the show, and then asked the MPAA rep if they violated the DMCA) Unfortunately, looking at the site now you have to buy a transcript or CD recording.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
The original concept of copyright was based on the notion that by producing creative works, authors benefit society, and so were entitled to make a living from a time-limited legal monopoly on the reproduction and distribution of their creations -- which would otherwise be technically easy for anyone to do, if the law didn't forbid it. As long as the creator (or other owner of copyright) had that control, everything else was basically OK. There was a clear and logical distinction between copying a book and reading it, and nobody was interested in preventing someone from reading, only in preventing someone from unauthorized printing.
The new notion of copyright seems to be based on a cyptographically and legally enforced "secure pipeline" from the content creator to each individually authorized end user. All new developments trend towards this end. Unauthorized viewing is as serious as unauthorized copying, in fact the distinction often disappears. The right to make a living from printing and selling a creative work has been replaced by the right to control how a creative work is used, and to be compensated for each use, every step of the way.
It is an entirely new paradigm, and if it succeeds in establishing itself, an entirely new information economy will result. Unfortunately, free speech will be an early casualty. Orwell's 1984 will no longer be a dystopian speculation, but a first-year business text.
Perhaps Siva is not a fan of the larger culture of hip-hop, but rather of rap music in particular, and YOU are actually the one conflating "rap" with "hip-hop." This makes sense, given that the Mr. Vaidhyanathan is speaking about the music - specifically, the density and complexity of the backing tracks of rap music - and not about dancers or MC's.
Sometimes, people mean what they say, and not more.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
Thomas Jefferson wrote:
He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody...
(letter to Isaac McPherson, 1813 as cited in Kock & Peden, 1972).
Jefferson believed that ideas, once released into the minds of others can no longer be considered the property of one person like land can be. But he also believed that the individual responsible for conceiving the idea should have some sort of just compensation for their ingenuity. It is the balance between these two concepts that forms the basis for fair intellectual property rights.
IP and MP (material property) are similar in that they don't really exist. They are both social conventions so useful that they have been codified into law. But we've had ten thousand years to work out the bugs in MP, while IP is still relatively new on the legal scene.
The reason MP doesn't threaten mobility is because of Right of Way. You can't enter my home without my permission, but you can use the road which I own in front of my house without consulting with anyone. A history of right of ways is instructive. They have been abused in the past in much the same way that IP rights are being abused today. But we got over them.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Creativity is just about always based on things that have gone before. When you stifle access to creative works by others who produce creative works (as the example in the interview about rap music), you lower the total overall creativity of society.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
> I demand a cut of his profits!
... you dont work for the entertainment industry by chance, do you? ;)
Say, that sounds familliar
"Old man yells at systemd"
The original concept of copyright was based on the notion that by producing creative works, authors benefit society, and so were entitled to make a living from a time-limited legal monopoly on the reproduction and distribution of their creations
ahem. No.
The original concept of copyright was instituted by the British Monarchy to facilitate authoritarian control over the then-emergent printing press, by requiring all works to 'register themselves' and provide certain information making the publisher known, accessible, and ultimately accountable to the Crown if they printed something the Crown found offensive. It was a means of controlling the printing press (by banning unauthorized printing presses) and, most importantly, controlling what was printed.
In other words, copyright was designed from the beginning to do exactly what it is becoming most famous for doing today: facilitate censorship.
Later refinements insured the profitability of those publishers so "blessed" by the crown, by setting up a book in which they could register works they were publishing so that the oligarchs wouldn't be competing with one another.
It wasn't until much later that the justification of "protecting the artist's right to profit from their works" was introduced, almost as an afterthought, well after the publishing oligarchy was well entrenched and generally as a way to mitigate criticism in some quarters with respect to the restritive (and monopolistic) nature of copyright. Unfortunately for the artists, copyright law then, as now, favors the publishers over the authors in most respects, belying its real intent (today: the maintenance of the copyright cartels and oligarchs, then: the maintenance of the authority of the Crown over what information was, and was not, available in print).
The United States adopted both copyright and patent law more or less intact from our former British overlords, with little questioning of the propoganda that justified such strictures (Thomas Jefferson was a rare exception who did question, and criticize, both concepts). The British Empire rose upon the force of tightly controlled trade monopolies and ultimately met its demise when said force, coupled with their weakening navel power to enforce it, couldn't withstand the pressures of a more open, modern marketplace. It is interesting that the two most restrictive, dangerous democracy-threatening aspects of American law both have their roots in British monopoly regimes we adopted more or less unchanged and without question.
The new notion of copyright seems to be based on a cyptographically and legally enforced "secure pipeline" from the content creator to each individually authorized end user.
Again, this is really only new in form, not in underlying substance. There have even been people drawn and quartered for copyright violation in England, and more recently, at the turn of the 20th century shopkeepers were beaten, businesses burned, and people perhaps even killed for copyright violations when the copyright holders of musical scores hired thugs to enforce their copyrights in accordance to a new law granting them such powers. Coercion has always been a part of copyright, as it must be since it creates an unnatural monopoly and artificial scarcity out of something which is inherently bountious (information).
if it succeeds in establishing itself, an entirely new information economy will result. Unfortunately, free speech will be an early casualty. Orwell's 1984 will no longer be a dystopian speculation, but a first-year business text.
That economy is likely to be relatively short lived and short circuit itself. Monopoly economies never operate at anything approaching the effeciency of an open, more or less free market, and there is only so much people are willign to spend, and so many hoops people are willing to jump through, before they will simply say "to hell with it, I'll do without." The Copyright Cartels, if they get what they want, will likely make far less than will if freedom of information wins out. It is similar to when they tried to ban videotape, only to have more than half their profits coming from video tape sales and rentals a decade later. Multiply that by a dozen emergent technologies, and who knows how many more that will never emerge if "Disney" Hollings has his way.
You are right, though, the first casualty of the New American Copyright will almost certainly be freedom of speech, exactly as copyright was designed to do in the first place, four centuries ago.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
The courts had stolen the soul. And rap music is poorer for it.
That's just bizarre. So rap is completely dependent on sampling the music of other artists? That's like piecing together a book based on snippets of other books.
I don't know you or how much you understand about the type of music you listen too, but I do know that "Rap" is something that occurs in (and is merely one component of) "Hip-Hop" music. A rapper may be one component of a Hip-Hop song. "Hip-Hop" is a type of music, culture, and lifestyle. When you talk about Jazz, do you say, I listen to Trumpet music?
It is just this type of language that does a disservice to the cultures you are discussing. I would argue that DJ's have had much more to do with the practice of sampling and creating new music from copyrighted material than rappers - although of course, MC's do their fair share of mix and match themselves. By saying that you like rap music, are you trying to say that it was the rappers who turned you on to explore the history of Copyright? Is it mainstream made-by-MTV artists like Ice Cube who really prompts discussion about the boundaries of copyright, or is it more the work of lesser known artists like Afrika Bammbatta and Funkmaster Flex, etc., that really show us why copyright law should be criticized?
If you mentioned the term Hacker to a group of Slashdot folks, or EFF people, or the GNU people, many (most?) would think you are speaking about "Computer Programmers" or "Technical Explorers" or whatever. People in the mainstream, thanks to various media and silly use of terminology, would probably think you are talking about those who break into computer systems and vandalize web pages.
The last thing we need are academics deciding what terms and language falls into the mainstream consciousness. If you are willing to write books about how cultural precedents, like those in Hip-Hop or Computer Programming are pointing toward a future of copyright reform, I would hope that you would take the time to really delve into the cultures that you are writing about. If you are willing to co-opt a cultural reference to add credibility to academic writing, the least you can do is give credit where credit is due!
If you and I each have an apple, and we share apples, after sharing, we each only have one apple.
/= Apples.
If you and I each have an idea, and we share ideas, after sharing we each have two ideas.
Ideas
Okay, so the last ten years has seen a revolution in technology. Specifically, the ability to create, copy, and widely disseminate digital data -- be it music, movies, text, images, whatever.
:)
One side effect of this is that it is now trivially easy for a sizable segment of the world's population (and an even larger proportion of the U.S.'s population) to violate copyright laws by (for example) purchasing music legally, making copies of that music, and disseminating it (illegally) for free to thousands of other people all over the world.
I argue that the primary purpose of law is to impose order upon a society, in a form of natural selection. Societies that lean toward laws and order are more likely to survive than societies that tend toward anarchy and chaos. Laws themselves tend to reflect the moral character of the times they are created in. Laws, like any moral system (or system of controlling behavior) are never absolute or inherent to the fabric of the universe (unless you believe that some god's laws are the "inherent morality" of the universe, but good luck getting me to believe that).
When laws conflict with reality, social stress results. There are those in society who hold the law as (almost?) sacred, and those who (in my opinion, more rightly) see the law as merely the current set of rules we must live under. (Tangent: I was dismayed to see a DEA official state that the DEA "does not want to encourage anything which might lead to a lessening of drug laws" (paraphrased) -- nevermind that the DEA, as a part of the Executive branch of our government, should not have any interest in WHAT the law is, merely in enforcing the CURRENT law, whatever it may be.)
This particular issue of stress has a particular set of industries on one side, and the bulk of the nation's citizens on the other. (I refuse to refer to people as "consumers"; it is demeaning.) Content creation industries -- music companies, film companies, publishing companies, and others who control large numbers of copyrights -- have historically based their entire business model on the idea of scarcity. They could charge money for good like music and books, because those goods could not be easily replicated by individuals. In this respect, books, music, and movies were much like any other product -- cars, power tools, furniture, or even food.
But with the dawn of the Internet and the abilities mentioned above, information like movies, music, and books can be endlessly replicated at almost zero cost by virtually any individual. Hence, the obvious conflict -- many people do not see such copying as "wrong". Why not?
The traditional view of "stealing" or "theft" involves taking an item from someone, such that the person no longer has that item. They have suffered a real, measurable loss in this instance. If I steal your car, your power tools, your furniture, or your food, you no longer have those things. Inversely, if you freely give me those things, you no longer have them to use. But information is different. Nowadays, I can freely give you a COPY of a piece of music, a book, or a movie, and still retain the original. Each of our two copies are indistinguishable -- they are identical and interchangable.
This was vaguely recognized by the Founding Fathers when they wrote the Constitution -- they understood that works (mainly books, at that time) could be bootlegged and sold illegally. They believed that a goverment-granted, and government-enforced temporary monopoly on the right to make money from the production of easily reproducible works, would help the nation, its economy, and its citizens. By giving authors that temporary monopoly, the law would encourage authors to produce more without fear that their work would be profited upon by those who had contributed nothing to it.
This was a fair idea, at the time, and indeed it is still a fair idea today. Unfortunately, the content creation industry has made great efforts toward extending the length of copyright, and if current trends continue, we can expect that no copyright will ever again expire. This obviously goes against the original intent of the copyright provisions, which was to allow authors a chance at fair compensation for their works, in exchange for that work entering the public domain after a certain period. Technically, that is still true, but it is quite obvious that the content creation industry has no intention of letting it continue to be true.
Back to the issue of being able to cheaply replicate any data. The problem here is that since many people do not see copying as theft, they are inclined to believe that the law is wrong and can be ignored. There is obviously a wide variety of views on the subject; some citizens believe in sticking to the letter of the law, while others will do casual copying in certain circumstances, and yet others will massively and freely distribute copyrighted information to anyone who wants it. Even further along are commercial pirates, those who actually try to make money selling copies of copyrighted works.
The content creation industry is generally responding to this widespread "threat" by trying to purchase legislation that specifically preserves their business model. Either they do not want to embrace new technologies and figure out how to profit from them, or they are just lazy, or whatever... but the upshot is that they believe that they have a right to profit, and that it is moral to buy legislation in their favor. Some citizens and government officials believe this as well, and support such legislation, either because they REALLY believe it's wrong, or because they've been bought off by media companies.
Depending on your political views, you may or may not support the idea of direct interference in an industry by the government, for purposes of "saving" that industry. I personally believe the following: A free-market economy is generally a good thing, but if left completely unregulated, it will lead to severe abuse by the most powerful entities in the economy. Certain governmental measures are warranted, in order to prevent such abuse. Rescuing a faltering industry can be warranted, but it depends on the particular instance. If privately owned utility companies (power and water) are faltering and cannot easily be saved by the market, it is acceptable for the government to intervene -- if those companies disappear, millions of citizens may be left without water or power for extended periods of time, which is not acceptable.
However, the content creation industry is not so critical. For one thing, they do not have localized monopolies -- if I live in Westwood (a suburb of Los Angeles), I don't have any option for who provides my water and power. I get it from the City of Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (yes, we make our own power, so no rolling blackouts for us!). If they go under and cannot provide power, then there is no way (aside from moving, which isn't feasible for hundreds of thousands of families to do at once) for me to get water and power until someone replaces the DWP. However, I can get music from numerous companies -- any of the big media conglomerates will have their music available for sale in numerous stores in the area, many of which are owned by different companies. If one (or five, or half) of the music companies goes out of business, I can still get music. Even if all music stores and companies went out of business simultaneously, I would still have all the music I had ALREADY purchased, and could listen to that while new music companies and stores were formed. (Unlike electricity, which you can't really store up in significant quantities.)
Essentially, industries which meet a certain limit of criticality are GENERALLY acceptable targets for government intervention when necessary, but of course that depends on exactly what the situation is. Trying to apply the same rules to everything, all the time, is stupid.
If the content industries can't hack it with their current business models, it will not significantly hurt anything for them to have to adapt -- even if some of them end up going out of business. It makes no sense to attempt to cripple the pace of technology and social development so that a few (relatively small) companies can survive. (By relatively small, I mean, for example, taht General Motors grosses more money in a year than all the music and film companies... COMBINED.)
Well, that's enough rambling for now. Hopefully this will inspire some creative thought in readers.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
You do, if that's the kind of jazz you like. Perhaps you particularly like jazz that features trumpets, as opposed to, say, a piano trio.
Rap music has rap over a backing track (or sometimes over nothing, though an older generation might simply call that poetry). It is a form of hip-hop. Consider Timo Maas, who makes some of the freshest beats today - are his releases hip-hop? Sure! They're not rap music, however, because . . . there's no rap! Afrika Bambaataa was a pioneer of electro-funk, another genre that we might include under the general rubric of hip-hop, but it would not be heresy to refer to his music as electro-funk, even though it is also hip-hop.
Face it, "rap music" is a genre of hip-hop. You may not like rap music, you may think that the MC gets too much attention in rap music, but to say that rap music is not itself a genre is simply wrong. It is at least an identifiable genre or subgenre of hip-hop.
Perhaps this is exactly what Siva is saying - and what is wrong with this? He's not talking about the people that pushed the bounds of copyright the furthest - in a legal sense, it is arguably Biz Markie, since he was the artist whose albums were pulled from the shelves because he used, without clearance, a sample from Gilbert O'Sullivan's "Alone Again, Naturally", and whose court case established the principle that the number of notes that may be sampled without permission is zero. He is talking about how his personal experience with rap music got him interested in the law of copyright. Your posts seem to be nothing more than showy attempts to berate Mr. Vaidhyanathan for liking Ice Cube - the insufferable MO of the hip-hopper-than-thou - and offer nothing nearly so informative as Siva's observations about how changes in copyright law and jurisprudence were reflected in popular music.
For what it's worth, I think he's right - the era of the aggressive sound collage largely vanished from popular rap music in the post-1991 era. Now, I wouldn't condemn all modern rap music or hip-hop generally as being mere "jeep beats and heavy bass" - I think the "Nathaniel Merriwether" projects of Dan the Automator and Prince Paul are genuinely creative. They are not, however, collages of samples in the same style as, say, Public Enemy's Fear of a Black Hat, which is composed entirely of samples, carefully assembled, and which predates Grand Upright Music v. Warner Brothers Music (the Biz Markie case).
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
Let me explain. A 100 years ago, when there was no concept of recordings, musicians performed in the public. Anybody who was adept enough could listen to their music, and perform it as his own a few miles down the road.
Then came the recording technology. Suddenly, a musician could be in a 1000 places at once, performing live! Wunderbar, isn't technology great? This also gave birth the recording companies.
Then came the digital music. It allowed the recording companies to make millions of identical copies of a piece of music. The industry was happier than ever, with record revenues(no pun intended).
Now, suddenly this digital revolution has turned around and bit them on the ass, with P2P, DiVX, etc. Suddenly, the recording industry wants to control the technology now.
The fact of the matter is, you don't see anybody else complaining that their livelihood is being hurt by technology! Why should there be an exception for the RIAA?
Thomas Babbington Macaulay wrote in his 1841 speech on copyright:
and further:
This point is a bit more subtle than it appears taken out of context. He is not saying that copyright is a bad thing or that it doesn't enable people to make creative works; just that extending copyright in any way beyond that which benefits the individuals actually doing the work will bring all the evils of state sponsored monopoly: to make copies of works overpriced and scarce without increasing the supply of new works.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
So when you introduce your future children or grand children to the Star Wars saga, in which order will you show the films?
On the order they were shot (4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3), or in the order of the story (1, 2, 3, 4 ,5, 6)?
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Way to live up to your namesake, mate! Keep up the good work, wreckin' the big boys grill...
Come on, give it up, that's
The injunction handed down on December 17, 1991 forced Biz Markie's hit album, "I Need a Haircut," off the shelves for including a sample of Gilbert O'Sullivan's "Alone Again (Naturally)." This case marked the end of sound collage in popular music, since it firmly established that the number of notes that may be sampled without permission is zero.
The US Supreme Court was a little bit looser in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc (the 2 Live Crew / Roy Orbison "Pretty Woman" case), and allowed 2 Live Crew the affirmative defense of fair use, overturning past decisions that had held commercial appropriation to be presumptively infringing.
These are probably the cases of the early '90s to which Mr. Vaidhyanathan is referring.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
In the US constitution (article I section 8), it is stated very clearly that the primary purpose of copyright and patent law in the US is "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".
I will not speak for whatever crazy notions the British have of copyright, but in the US at least I feel the constitutional principle of copyright is sound. However I also feel that current copyright law in the US is unconstitutional, for the following reasons:
No. But bad laws are worse that they at first seem. They destroy respect for the law. I have largely written off copyright law, because it is more of a Microsoft EULA (or rather a Disney EULA?) than a way that Americans choose to be governed. I'm more in favor of buying CDs than my wife, but it is a horribly inefficient way of supporting the artists. I might as well simply download them instead. I paid for my version of LimeWire, by the way. That wasn't a copyright issue so much as a support issue.
To boil it down: being a bunch of assholes creates an enormous public backlash against your position, no matter what laws you buy.
Most p2p people aren't abusing fair use. Borrowing and ripping a friend's CD, that's abusing it. The rest simply don't care. That's got nothing at all to do with fair use. The real abusers of fair use are the companies.
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
You see many, many people complaining their livelihood is being removed by technology - factory workers into robots, craftsmen replaced by factories.... musical groups replaced by one producer and a machine. Local businesses going under because transportation technology is good enough that importing is cheaper.
Hint - these people aren't getting a break. Now look at the size of a break these associations are getting.
Indeed, it is one thing for critics of IP to diss technology regulation such as the DMCA and TLAVOTSHB (The Latest Acronym Version of the Stupid Hollings Bill). The key point here, is that principled advocates of strong intellectual property protection, such as myself, feel equally strongly that these laws have no place in America.
Technology regulation is an abomination to the careful balance of intellectual property rights, and affirmatively stunts economic and technological growth. Giving patent-like protections to copyright holders on unpatentable technologies for indefinite terms would be an anathema if proposed as an amendment to the patent system -- why does doing it in defense of the copyright laws make it less awful?
IP works if, and only if, the careful foundations on which it is predicated are followed. Technology regulation is a blight on the face of the IP universe, and is bad on balance for our nation and all of its authors and inventors, whether or not you are a critic of the Copyright Act in the first place.
That's correct. More correct than you seem to realize.
Which is why land ownership is also a balance of rights. As it should be.
The difference, economically speaking, between Land and IP is that Land--by definition--exists independently of human effort. (If someone made it, economists don't consider it Land.)
The moral and Constitutional justification for copyright law and other forms of IP is the public interest in promoting the arts and useful sciences; in other words, we need some laws protecting intellectual property to encourage people to keep making it. But no such justification exists for laws protecting Land rights. It's not as though people will stop manufacturing Land.
This is classical economics, going back to the eighteenth-century writings of David Ricardo and Adam Smith and carried forward through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Henry George. Private property in Land is an artificial legal construct that in many cases interferes with the free market. Just like overbroad intellectual property protection, Land monopoly causes hoarding, speculation, and underuse.
Most people take Land monopoly for granted, because it's as old as monarchy. But it's just as overreaching and unnecessary as the most draconian intellectual property law, and it's just as much of a taking from the commons--but literally, not metaphorically.
If scarcity were the justification for property, then the scarcer the good, the more valuable it would be. But that is not the case. Real estate is more expensive in California than it is in Wyoming, yet the scarcity is the same. There are other factors involved, such as desirability and convenience.
Take a look at apples. California and Japan grow approximately the same amount of apples. Yet the cost of an apple in Japan is probably ten times the cost of an apple in California. Now consider Washington, which grows lots of apples, and you'll find the cost is pretty much the same as it is in California. Scarcity doesn't explain this. But distribution does. It's cheaper to distribute apples to California than it is to distribute them to Japan.
Still not convinced? Take a look at bottled water. The cost has nothing to do with the actual scarcity.
Material property is purely a social convention codified into law. When I am at work I am not at home. During my work hours I have zero need for my living room, kitchen, bedroom and bathroom. So why is it still my property while I am away? Why can't someone else use it during my working hours? Surely some arrangement could be made where I use my apartment from 12 to 8, you use it from 8 to 4, and someone else from 4 to 12. But that's not the social convention.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Past that, while borrowing & ripping and downloading are, in a practical sense, identical, the first is an abuse of fair use while the second is farther along- individual piracy. At least that's the way I see the difference.
I'm with you on seeing p2p as a "protest" as stupid. They're linked, though, protest and p2p. I'm voting with my mouse, and it's not going to the major studios' sites. If I couldn't p2p, I'd go back to almost entirely doing without. There're a few bands that I go out and buy, but that's very limited. The money I spend on music hasn't gone down any, so there're no "lost sales" that my hard drive has stolen from the hard-working stiffs at the RIAA. So I don't feel bad about it. My music purchases have gone up, if anything- I simply have more money now, it's not some noble p2p sentiment. That's just where I'm at.
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
IANAL, but isn't there some clause in copyright law stating that you can produce a derivative work using sampled music royalty- and permission-free as long as you sample less than 4 bars?
:-D
I was under the impression that this was how MC Hammer's "You Can't Touch This" was not only possible but inpsired (it's ripped from that "Superfreak" song, the name of the artist escapes me at the moment), as well as many works by Weird Al Yankovic. Does this apply to only parodies? I'm pretty sure if the song is a remix of the sampled song you need permission no matter what, but for simply taking a small clip for yor own purposes is legal.
I know for a fact in techno/house/other electronic music many producers rip drums and hi hats from existing records because it saves production time, especially if you find the sound you where trying for already created. Of course, most of these producers probably don't give a sh*t because they realize it's no biggie...
I hope someone can answer this because it may mean I need to strip a phatty lil Biz Markie sample from my latest
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
... so just imagine what it must be like in Australia. Here we're under the thumb of your laws thanks to a legislature that thinks we're an American state (but are even stupider, so we end up with stunningly badly drafted laws) but we don't get any vote or say in the US laws.
US passes law.
Aust citizens protest and are ignored because "the US did it" so:
Aust passes same law drafted even worse.
I never thought I'd say this, but at least for Australia, US citizens really can "save the world".
*sigh*
Creativity, on the other hand, need not involve tired, old rehashes of somebody else's material -- and when reuse is necessary, you can always ask first.
Actually a lot of creative works involve taking existing material and rehasing it. The example in the article was rap music, which quite obviously does this. Popular music even coined the term "cover version" for taking an old song and rehasing it. Similarly Disney frequently takes existing stories and makes animated movies out of them. Shakesphere used existing stories and turned them into plays. There are modern rehashes of his plays, "Forbidden Planet" and "West Side Story" being amongst the more well known.
IP on the other hand, is not scarce. If I use an idea you originally came up with, it does not exclude you from also using that same idea in your own way.
In the past IP was often part of a piece of MP (Material Property) e.g. a book. The cost of the media, be it a book, video tape, CD or even broadcast transmitter. Ment that copying and distributing was expensive. Especially for a "one off"... However the cost of media has been falling, to the point where it is possible to make a one off copy cheaply. This was first the case with cassette tapes, then after that CD's.
What we now have is a situation where there is effectivly no media involved. For the first time in history we have IP in it's most pure form.
We don't, yet, have Star Trek style replicators which would make physical items trivial to clone and transport.
If someone made it, economists don't consider it Land. Kansi airport is basically Capital, not Land.
Coincidence du jour: InfoAnarchy has just posted a review of Siva's Copyrights and Copywrongs. Check it out!
-- haaz.
Fellow /.ers,
;-)
A friendly debate: Which book is a better read: Lessig's Code or Vaidhyanathan's Copyrights and Copywrongs? We're not looking at the specifics of the content -- Code being about the regulation of cyberspace -- but their readability. I will take no offense at those who give Code the nod.
-- haaz.
The post I was replying to asserted that copyright is being used as a form of censorship TODAY.
... authors' own publishers can and do use copyright to silence books they do not want to see the light of day, and much of this censorship is politically motivated. (See Into the Buzzsaw, edited by Kristina Borjesson, for other accounts by Pulitzer and Peabody Award winning journalists for testimonials about the current state of the "free press" in America today. It will make you hair stand up on end.
You haven't gotten out much the last few months, have you?
I am assuming you are not a troll, merely uninformed. I suggest you begin by going to eff.org. Then continue your education by looking up information on digital watermarks, and how the DMCA was used to initimidate and, initially, prevent the publication of a scholarly paper demonstrating how ineffective watermarking is (the work was later published, as a direct result of the widespread public outcry, much of which was stirred up by the reporting of that very story here on slashdot).
I would then refer you to Dmitry Sklyarov, who was imprisoned in the United States for giving a speech on the weaknesses of Adobe's eBook encryption while attending a conference in Las Vegas (hint to Adobe: rot13 is NOT encryption!), under the incredibly weak notion that he as an employee was responsible for his employer having sold software illegal in the U.S. (but legal and, under Russian law, required before any eBook may be legally sold there!).
Ever wonder why Prince is now 'the Artist formerly known as Prince?' No, it wasn't arrogance. He signed a bad contract with a record label, so draconian he wasn't even allowed to use his own stage name anymore, unless he continued working for that label for pennies on the dollar. Instead he wrote the word "SLAVE" across his forhead and performed (on MTV IIRC) as the guy 'formerly known' as Prince, and for a while (perhaps still) he couldn't even perform his older material that he, as an artist, created. This is censorship, brought to you by modern American copyright law.
There are numerous hip-hop and rap artists who have been censored from presenting their work because of copyright, not necessarilly because their sampling isn't fair use (in most cases it is), but because the threat of a lawsuit by deep pocketed Copyright Cartels like the record labels is sufficient to silence their speech. This is censorship, brought to you by modern American copyright law.
More recently, George Lucas co-opted the Star Wars Fan Fiction Convention, then summarilly disallowed any and all fan fiction that wasn't a parody or spoof, eliminating many, many works (including some of the IMHO most interesting ones) from competition or exposure, effectively silencing those authors. Copyright allows him to do this (it grants him exclusive ownership of the Star Wars universe and will do so for the rest of our natural lives), despite the fact that the Star Wars mythos has ingrained itself into our cultural fabric.
Silencing those authors is censorship, brought to you by modern American copyright law.
There was an attempt to use copyright law to silence the author of The Wind Done Gone, a retelling of Gone With the Wind from a black American slave's point of view, an attempt which very nearly succeeded and didn't mainly because of the racial overtones and the amount of attention (and funding for the defense) that particular aspect of the issue brought to bear.
Had she not had such strong public opinion on her side, and such wide public exposure as a result, she too would likely have fallen prey to censorship, brought to you once again by modern American copyright law. For every author like that who does manage to get into the public eye, there are hundreds of others who do not, and whose work you never see, never hear, as a result.
Finally, have you tried to get a copy of Du Pont: Behind the Nylon Curtain by Gerard Colby? Good luck. The book was privished by its publisher (against the author's wishes, obviously) at the behest of one of America's most powerful families. I suggest you look up the word "privish"
Whether performed by corporations, by powerful individuals, or by government, silencing the words, thoughts, creativity, and opinions of people is censorship, and the most common tool in use today for accomplishing that is Copyright Law.
Copyright Law was initially created and designed to facilitate censorship. It has since been subject to some minor modifications and reforms, but its inherent structure remains largely unchanged. No one has even considered trying a different approach to granting exclusive monopolies as a means to compensating the artists, in large part because, by the time the question ever arose, there were already large publishing interests in place who benefited from the old, censorship-prone copyright regime.
This is why copyright, more than any other set of laws, is so effective at facilitating censorship in countries that otherwise are fairly open and permissive. It is why websites can be taken down at the merest allegation of copyright violation, even while the supreme court with the other hand defends the rights of adult websites to remain on the 'net. Of the two approaches to censoring the net, the DMCA, and copyright, has been vastly more effective than the SCA we all feared so much a couple of years earlier.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I'll assume that you aren't a communist moron, merely you just don't know how to think for yourself. All of your examples have one thing in common. The copyright holders voluntarily witheld their own works. Whether it is because the fear of lawsuit, the fact that the orignial author sold the rights to someone else, or the author never had the right to publication in the first place, none of the actors in your story were censored by anyone but themselves.
The DMCA is a bad law, I agree. Professor Felten could have faced criminal charges under the DMCA, but there is nothing that would have prevented him from publishing the paper anonymously is there? The first ammendment does not protect you from the consequences of your speech, it only protects you from a priori censorship; so sayeth the Supreme Court.
Censorship is not about people being able to sell books or publish papers, censorship is about preventing ideas from being shared. This is not the case in any of your examples.
I couldn't find "privish" in any of the dictionaries I tried, but I assume it means "available at Amazon.com" since that's where I found the book you refered too.
Here: a link I assume if you are against copyright you are against Patents too, so you'll probably want to get it from Barnes and Noble. Maybe you couldn't find it because the authors name is "Gerald" not "Gerard".
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The only thing more annoying than a Libertarian is an (un|mis)informed Libertarian
I'll assume that you aren't a communist moron, merely you just don't know how to think for yourself.
So you were a mindless troll after all, not merely uninformed. My mistake.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
If you really are not a troll, and our personalities are merely clashing online (a possibity I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt on) I would plead with you to inform yourself about these issues and think for yourself, rather than simply spouting the media line on what is and is not censorship, and what copyright does and does not do.
I couldn't find "privish" in any of the dictionaries I tried, but I assume it means "available at Amazon.com" since that's where I found the book you refered too.
You found four used copies (three of which are also available at Barns and Noble). The book is out of print, and having been privished it never enjoyed widespread availability and was always very difficult to obtain, despite significant demand during the author's book tour (for which the books were not delivered, denying those who were interested access to the material at the time). The book was privished in 1974. It is now 2002, and you can buy a whopping 3 used copies on the net, and probably not more than a dozen nationwide altogether.
[a 0.1 second google search yeilds]
Censorship is not about people being able to sell books or publish papers, censorship is about preventing ideas from being shared.
Censorship is most certainly about publishing papers and (being allowed to) sell books. If a publisher deliberately prints too few books, and deliberately doesn't ship them out to bookstores for book tours in an effort to insure the book is financially unviable (that is privishing), then they are most certainly "preventing ideas from being shared" (your words), and they are using copyright law to do so. If a professor cannot publish his research results for fear of prosecution under copyright law, that is censorship. In both cases people are being prevented from sharing their ideas. What is your next argument, that suppression of a work or idea in a mass medium isn't real censorship because the people being so silenced could go door to door and share their thoughts in person?
Each and every one of my examples demonstrated how copyright law is being used to censor people in various professions and walks of life. Your argument that people "voluntarilly" are giving up their rights is akin to the notion that prisoners are "voluntarilly" giving up their freedom. Copyright law in its current form allows, even facilitates, the wholesale swindling of artists and consumers by the Copyright Cartels, and The Artist Formerly Known as Prince is but one of many artists trying to let the uninformed world know that, despite being very effectively silenced by the media controlled, in many instances, by those very same cartels.
Those people were no more censoring "themselves" than the millions in eastern Europe who remained quiet beneath an authoritarian regime were
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
time is money...
money is power...
power corrupts...
therefore, by waiting we are corrupting them even more..."
Don't wait -- act!
A republican democracy such as the American system is ineffective unless we participate in it. That's one reason why ours (America's) has suffered so much over the past 20+ years.
-- haaz.
National Public Radio's legal magazine show Justice Talking has just released the show in which MPAA attorney Fritz Attaway debates the virtures of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act with Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity. The show was recorded on March 4 in Philadelphia and is available in RealPlayer format and is archived here.
-- haaz.