Slashdot Mirror
Copyright as Cudgel
kongstad writes "In an issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Siva Vaidhyanathan has some interesting things to say about the concept of Copyright: 'Back in the 20th century, if someone had accused you of copyright infringement, you enjoyed that quaint and now seemingly archaic guarantee of due process. Today, due process is a lot harder to pursue, and the burden of proof increasingly is on those accused of copyright infringement.'" A very good academic look at the recent expansions of copyright law.
Did you know that the man that authored the copyright clause in the U.S. Constitution was the same man who started this nation's first free book lending library?
Any lights going on out there?
The fact of the matter is that our government has been looking for excuses to curtail the freedoms we enjoy for a long time. Why? Well, if its news to you, most politicians make a career out of staying in office. This was something the forefathers never imagined. The constant desire to win the elections leads these politicians to ask for money and the big corporations pony up and cough up the dough. What happens then? Well, poor people like me who can't afford to shell out cash to my congressman gets left out of the political process. Sure, I can vote but if my viewpoints don't come with a dollar figure then they are meaningless. The DMCA is the brain-child of this process we call "democracy" (we should rename it to "big-corp'ocracy").
So why aren't most people doing anything about it? Since they don't know what is going on. The local 10 o'clock news doesn't carry this stuff. Do you want to take a stab at why? Well, most local tv news stations are owned by big corporation and they cannot afford to criticize the DMCA since they can weild it around so freely. Articles like this are good, but what slashdotters don't understand is that there needs to be a concerted effort to write editorials in the papers constantly to make sure that the rest of America sees this for what it is.
But for the past 20 years, the right-wing in America, funded by their deep pocketed friends in Big Business(TM), have mounted a legal, political and social assault against individuals' right to sue. Sometimes they use the moniker "tort reform." Othertimes, they talk about "greedy lawyers" and "runaway lawsuits" that inevitably hurt those poor, small business owners out there that can't afford to defend themselves against the tassel loafer set.
In the real world, it is the small business owner, the independent contrator, the worker and the consumer that gets screwed. When Big Business(TM) infringes upon on traditional rights, we are the ones who need the courts to come to our aid, to make up for the unfair advantage that wealthy campaign-contributing businesses enjoy in the Legislature and with th executive.
In this case, the minions of Big Business(TM) have enacted a law that places the burder of proof on the accused, rather than the accuser. Which perverts the system of checks and balances, and instead turns the full weight of all three branches of government against the little guy.
We are almost all in favor of gutting the DMCA on this site. But let's not forget this broader issue the next time some slick Republican starts carrying on about the need for tort reform, judicial appointments and restrictions on lawsuits.
When Big Business(TM) owns the Congress and the White House, the courts are our only hope don't let them take that away from us, too.
Why is it called COMMON sense when so few people have it?
In the 20th century it was hard to be a copyright infringer. You had to have a lot of publishing equipment and junk. You had to make that money back by selling pirated goods. The people you sold the goods to weren't thought of as copyright infringers. They weren't thought about at all.
Today, your average home internet user can be a copyright infringer simply by using a P2P network. It is trivally easy to copy information. Copyright infringement has moved from a public corporate regulation to a private morality issue.
When copyright law was created, copying was expensive. It was hard to maintain a printing press. That only really changed with the advent of the internet. Even previous technologies such as tape recording could be ignored by lawmakers (more or less) because they did not unite the possibility of easy copying with easy mass distribution. That has changed. Modern law is struggling to keep up.
The example is poetry... At one time poets were well paid and could achieve a certain amount of fame and occaisional hefty profits for their work. Nowdays very few poets can "make a living" solely from their art. People still write poems, but the high availability of cheap publishing ensures that they won't make much money at it.
Music is going through the same kind of schism... rock and roll music is a cheap commodity these days, as proven by the big labels that invent bands from thin air dozens of times a year. Distributing music via the internet is shockingly cheap, so naturally the profit motives will be lessened and the artform thinned out.
The problem is when the record companies buy laws to stave off the decline of their art as a cash cow. There interference merely delays the evolution of the artform and introduces serious questions about art, freedom, and copyrights.
Personally, I realize that record companies have legal grounds for trying to stop music sharing, but I don't believe they'll have much success in doing it. They might have an easier time of it searching for a new business model on which to rebuild the artform...
People shape laws. Not the other way around.
I was speaking with a friend of mine recently about his law practice. Because of my interest in the free software movement, I asked him if he ever works in copyright law. He does quite a bit. I asked him to explain the original intent of copyright law. He said that it was to protect inventors and authors from having their work stolen from them - to secure to them the rights to receive the benefits of their ideas. He didn't mention anything about "the progress of science and useful arts."
I told him my reason for asking about copyright and explained the basics of the GNU GPL. It turns out that he's one of the regional lawyers for Microsoft. It was counter-intuitive to him that people would contribute to a product as a peer-production effort without receiving a direct monetary reward. His impression of the open source community was that they are a bunch of hooligan pirates who don't want to pay for anything and will steal intellectual property rather than pay for it.
This was rather shocking to me because I'm not a pirate. I don't have any illegally-obtained recordings, movies, or software. I don't share my copies with those who ask. I view open source as a superior development model, not as a malicious piracy scheme.
What I learned from this experience is that we need to do more educating of people. We need to teach people that the free software movement has noble intentions. We have an entirely different business model and product development procedure. We don't do business the same way Microsoft does. That's offputting to people who can imagine nothing but proprietary ownership.
This post is long, but I'd like to make one more point: Why does fundamental ownership of a creation have to be a problem? I think a programmer who puts his sweat and tears into code has a fundamental right to he benefits of his work. I feel personally attached to songs that I record. Copyleft is about using that fundamental right of ownership to set the creation free and to allow others freedom to use it. In order to be able to set something free, you must first own that something.
Oh, I see. So in order to make sure that they don't bribe politicians in order to get their way, we do it their way FOR FREE?? It's a nice libertarian principle, and I used to feel that way, but it just doesn't work. The point of the government is to protect the rights of it's citizens. Why should businesses be the only ones exempt from laws?
Once upon a time there was a man named Adam Smith. His thesis was that "men working to fulfill their own selfish desires will lead to benefitting society". I guess that's roughly true, but it seems he never heard of game theory.
Ok, picture this game: There are four people, each with a 100 dollars, and they're playing a game. The game is sponsored by someone. Here are the rules. Each person can put however much money they want towards the pot. Each round the pot is doubled by the sponsor and split amongst them. So if they all put in 20, they end up with 80, doubled equals 160, and split by 4 is 40. So they each end up with double they put in. Now imagine that 3 people put in 20 but the fourth person puts nothing. So the total in the pot is 60, which when doubled is 120, and divided by 4 is 30. So each of them make 10 dollars profit, except for the person who put in nothing, who made 30 dollars profit.
So what happens when they tried this in real life? Well in the first round they all put in about half their money. But each round they put in succesively less and less until by the last round, they've all learned their lesson, and put in nothing.
So imagine further, a new rule. Anyone can pay 3 dollars to take away 10 dollars from someone else. So now if the fourth one puts in nothing, the three others pay 3 dollars each and take away all 30 dollars that he won, ending up with a profit of zero, but they each won 7 dollars profit. So this new rule totally changed the nature of the game, and actually, paradoxically, made it easier to trust each other.
You know what happened in this game? It started out the same...they each bet half of what they had. But each round after that, the slowly bet more and more, till the last round when they all bet the whole pot, and really made a ton of money.
So what's the lesson here? Changing the rules a little bit can help everybody. That's the governments job. Just because the government is forcing a business to do something doesn't mean they don't want to do it. It might just mean that they want to do it, but they want to make sure the others have to do it too.
Like software patents. Getting rid of them would definitely help the software industry, but they still hoarde them and prosecute them because they get the same treatment from the others.
I know, you're a libertarian, so you likely agree with me about software patents, but government is not bad. The US government is bad, they never do anything right, it's shameful. But that shouldn't turn you off to the idea of government. I think you'd agree that certain 'public' things are best taken care of by non-commercial entities. Schools. Libraries. Roads. Public transport.
Let's look at public transport. Even though the city usually does not recoup money from bus and train fares, it doesn't matter. The city doesn't recoup money for laying and maintaining roads either. Almost anything with very low scarcity, but a high fixed cost should be publicly funded, because it's the most efficient system. If you charge excessively, less people use it, and since there's no scarcity (no marginal cost) the less people who use it, the higher the cost PER use, and hence the lower efficiency.
"Government" is not inherently bad, you really should consider that possibility.
Bad kaws get wriiten all the time, but they do frequently get over turned eventually. One of the best means of arguing against a law is to develop a 'literature' of archtypical examples of that law being abused.
One of the reason thye anti-DMCA and Bono Act forces aren't getting traction with the public is they are doing a poor job of building that 'literature of abuse'. We need to get away from the examples involving hacker groups, cryptologists discussing obscure algorythms and p2p piracy (never allow them to couple p2p with copyright -- two different issues). Instead we need to concentrate on examples that resonate with the mythical Joe Sixpack.
A week or so ago I had dinner with a couple of journalists... neither of them particularily Tech savy. Some how the conversation turned to these copyright issues. I've reak a lot of the stuff on Chilling Effects quite carefully. I started out with the stories of the Underwater Gardening mailgroup problems and the poor lady and her Dragon Art that got stomped on by Anne McCaffrey. Both of those stories resonatedwith my listeners because they were "little guy getting squashed" stories. We then moved onto the Bona Act and some of the DMCA issues Both of these journalists requested the URL to Chilling Effects so they could read further.
In short, don't present a non-technical person with technical examples they'll have difficulting sympathizing with. Use some simple marketting and engage them with human interest stories... stories they can relate to. The little guy getting screwed never sits well with the public, we need to build up a literature of those types of stories to redefine the 'spin' of the debate.
deserve's got nothing to do with it...
I thought at first this would be another piece of guff from a "guru" jumping on a bandwagon. But no, some interesting stuff in the article. Worth reading and looking at the recommended action plans.
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It seems to me that battles over Intellectual Property Rights are part of the continual struggle for power and influence between Big business and the individual / consumer.
I remember from a discussion with a politics student some 20 years ago that power was defined as the ability to break an agreement/promise with impunity. She thought there were 4 types of power relationship:
Physical: Give me that valuable resource or I cudgel you!
Knowledge/Skill: Do as I say, I'm an expert in this area and I can run rings round you
Positional: I am your line manager and I don't care what I promised, you work for me and don't forget it.
Systemic: You don't even know that you are losing out because I write the rules of the game and there is no mechanism by which you can protest.
The first three powers can be held in check, controlled and balanced to some extent, well enough for us all to get some benefit. The last is more of a threat.
Big Money has always been keen to use systemic power because they can and lest such power be used against them. Setting the terms of trade, aggressive lobbying of government, aggressive use of legal muscle in SLAPP suits(strategic lawsuits against public participation) are all well honed tools.
It is not clear to me that such battles are winnable. In the end Big Money does have more money and any new development will eventually be brought under control. But . . . .
Some have compared the grabbing of IP to the enclosure of common land (dates vary in different countries but it was back in the 18th Century in the UK) but generally land was less productive when held in common. The reverse is true of IP and copyright. When closely held, it produces less wealth for society. The more this is seen to be the case, the less interest Big Whatever will have in pursuing it
Maybe the aim should be to demonstrate the benefits of free sharing of Knowledge. If a country or group of people share IP freely and reap so much benefit then people will start asking why don't we do this too.
Lets have some more seminal Cathedral and Bazaar articles!
- Cut copyright terms down to 20 years, the same as patents. This puts a vast amount of out-of-print content in the public domain, which will help to bootstrap the broadband revolution. Just think of all those old TV shows waiting to be downloaded.
It's not really a big-ticket item for the content owners, but it's just what's needed to sell all that broadband hardware. And in the end, it will probably be a win for the movie industry; once all that broadband bandwidth is in place, they'll have a new distribution channel.
- Restrict technical controls on content. If you can't prevent some act under copyright law, you can't protect it by technical means either. This prohibits controls which restrict resale, skipping commercials, etc.
- Restrict end-user license agreements. Again, if an act can't be prohibited under copyright law, an EULA can't prohibit it either. No benchmarking restrictions, resale restrictions, etc.
- No protection on broadcast content. If it goes out over the public airwaves, technical protection measures are prohibited. Protected content has to go out over the Internet, cable, or purchased spectrum like DirectTV or MMDS. Anybody can build a PVR, and yes, it can skip commercials.
That's a strong starting point. It's not unrealistic in the current political climate, either.