A History of the Digital Copyright Struggle

sconeu writes "The National Journal has an article detailing the battle between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. An interesting read, it discusses the tech industry's early miscues, and the efforts made to ensure that Hollywood isn't the only voice heard on the Hill."

Comments

Outlawing The Right to Read

[Anonymous Coward]

CBDTPA & other such future laws will outlaw information sharing. They will forbid the fundamental right to share. It is very important to understand this process.

(1) "The Right to Read" by Richard M. Stallman.

http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

(The important thing about this story is that it was written before the DMCA was even proposed!)

(2) "What's Wrong With Copy Protection" by John Gilmore.

http://cryptome.org/jg-wwwcp.htm

(3) "Re-evaluating Copyright: The Public Must Prevail" by Richard M. Stallman.

http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/reevaluating-copyrig ht.html

What is copyright, and what is it meant to accomplish? How can we tell whether it is meeting its goals?

This was also written before the DMCA; Stallman argued that copyright law had _already_ gone too far.

(4) Sold Out, By James Boyle

http://www.wcl.american.edu/pub/faculty/boyle/sold _out.htm

DaveNET plan

[perfessor multigeek]

Check out scripting.com, where Dave Winer and his friends have figured out a good response to this. Don't sit around bitching, learn how to game the legislative process and get good people elected.
They've started backing the Libertarian candidate to replace one of the Congress critters backing this nonsense and now she's getting real media coverage and is given a chance to win.
We don't need to put up with these yahoos in DC. God knows they need us more than we need them, so let's get moving on replacing their bought and paid for asses.
I'm certainly doing my partto spread the word.
Rustin

Re:History repeating itself

[puppet10]

The early history of Hollywood is even more interesting.

The first motion picture studios were in New York City, but they moved out to California to avoid paying licensing fees to Edison for his patents. They then avoided his lawsuits by going to
Mexico until the heat was off. (1)

Then in the late thirties antitrust lawsuits were attempted against the big eight leading to a consent decree between the studios and the justice dept. (we all know how effective those are ;>) promising to limit some monopolistic practices. The independants (at that time) used their name recognition (Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, Samuel Goldwyn, Mary Pickford, Orson Welles) to take their case to the people recruiting other well known names to promote their cause - Howard Hughes, Hal Roach, Leo McCarey, Sol Lesser, James Cagney, Bing Crosby, John Huston, Preston Sturges, Sam Spiegel, and Stanley Kramer.

In 1948 a supreme court decision against the big eight for conspiracy forced them to sell their theater holdings and stop certain monopolistic practices such as block booking (requiring a theater to buy all the films they needed in a single package, hmm sounds a little like bundling).

The studio system and its opposition which forced the dissolution then both faded away leading to the rise of new monopoly structure.

(2)

Hasn't been true since 1830

[Anonymous Coward]

in the past, you could wait and honestly expect a work (movies, books, et al) to become public domain in a resonable (1 1/2 -3 decade) timespan (emphasis added)

How old are you? In 1831, congress set copyright to 28 years plus a 14 year extension. In 1909, congress set the extension to 28 years for a total of 56 years. That's 5 1/2 decades. How many movies have you seen from 1908 or earlier?

I suppose if you've lived here since 1830, you might still consider 5 1/2 decades a reasonable wait...