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Lessig Spins Copyright Law
ceebABC writes "In the always riveting CIO Insight magazine, tech-pundit (and professor) Lawrence Lessig examines the copyright laws and how they can be applied to e-books and other electronic forms of rights management... i.e., in today's world, the author doesn't receive a royalty everytime someone reads a book from the library. Will they in the future?"
He's got good points about if you have a book now, you can loan it to friends or borrow it from the library without any troubles.
The problem is, that before eBooks, you couldn't "loan" your copy of the book to 10,000 of your friends on Kazaa.
There are some interesting ideas in there, but I don't think his ideas are the answer. They are a good start though.
Why not have a short copyright term as the standard (say life + 10 years). But if a corporate entity wants to keep that copyright past that point, it would have to pay a substantial fixed fee plus some small royalties to the government (i.e. a tax on profits).
This way, the list of long-term copyrights would be small, maintained in a single place, and thus easily searchable. There would be a financial disincentive in place to keep companies from locking up works unless they were actively making money. Companies are happy, museums are happy, the gov'ment is happy, and the internet is happy.
-- Heisenberg might have slept here.
Authors should definitely recieve royalties - just not from a public library that my tax dollars went to fund.
I'm an author, and I don't object at all to my books ending up on library shelves. When it happens, it means I'm probably "relieved" of 97% of my royalty for each time the book is read -- given that I suppose the average library book is checked out 30 times. But I don't care that this is such a bad deal for me, since I think it's great that people are reading my book.
But I bristle at your notion that libraries ought to be entitled to distribute recently created copyrighted works, with no compensation whatsoever to the author. On what basis do you feel that government should essentially engage in intellectual theft?
I'm trying to understand your point of view, but I can't make any sense of it. It seems totally selfish and poorly thought out.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
Did you know that even when you own a paper version of a book, it is illegal to download an electronic version of the book? The current copyright applies not only to the content (as it should; especially since copyright is supposed to promote advancement in arts), but also the format (which should be protected by patents, not copyright). As a consequence, under the copyright law you have to pay twice for the same book - the paper and the electronic version.
I read the actual copy right law as applied to print and recordings. It seems fairly straight forward.
You buy a book. You own the book. You can sell the book. You can make copies of the book for personal use. If you sell the original, all the copies have to be destroyed, or go with the original. You can't sell copies with out the copy right holders permission. You can even loan the book, as long as the person you loan it to returns it and doesn't keep a copy.
I can't understand why software is being treated in a different manner.
Just my two cents.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Everyone realizes that not everything is scalable; what works on a certain scale may not on another.
Libraries are a wonderful institution that doubtlessly cut into the income of those who produce the books. More importantly (to me) they are repositories of books that are out of print and can't easily be located. Older books doubtless stimulate interest in buying newer ones. In the very earliest days, of course, few could afford books at all.
The thing is, electonic distribution blows up the apple cart. It's just too easy. And I worry it will somehow fundamentally change a system that we have grown used to over many decades. Just because the library system is familiar and effective doesn't mean that scaling it to the Web will work. It will be wonderful for the user, but the producer? In fact, in could be a disaster, save the current reality that reading books on a computer just isn't like a real book.
The problem is, what exactly constitues an open? A file open? A read from memory? A sleep cycle? A power off/power on cycle? A pause of reading over X minutes of time?
This sticks of something else: the ruling that called a read from a hard drive to memory a 'copy'.
I feel that this is one point where the analogy between physical and digital breaks down...
libraries will only be distributing pulic domain works in digital form. They aren't in the business of collecting royalties for authors, nor do they wish to be. That's kind of part of the point.
And for the most part customers of libraries *don't want ebooks.*
This is not to say they do not *pay* royalties to authors though.
What do you suppose would happen if *libraries stopped buying books*?
I guess most people aren't aware of the fact that for a comparitively huge percentage of books published library sales make up a huge percentage of *total* sales.
If libraries boycotted publishers an awful lot of publishers would simply go out of business overnight. Particularly the "specialty" houses.
What the hell kind of world are we building anyways when *public libraries* are regarded as "theives"?
KFG
The type of protection a creative work receives should not hinge on the notion that transmitting an e-book involves making a copy or that reading a library book does not. These are legal nitpicks. The Supreme Court could decide that reading a book constitutes copying the contents of the book into your brain. Then the very act of reading would technically be regulated by copyright law. To me it doesn't matter whether this type of regulation is achieved by ridiculously redefining the notion of "copying" or by introducing book licensing. Either tactic is government by hair-splitting.
The question of copyright shouldn't revolve around the technical interpretation of existing law. The question should be how, in real terms in today's world, copyright law can best implement the intent that is stated in the Constitution, which is simply to provide incentive to produce new works.
If e-books are to be considered a threat to creativity and invention, it should be because e-books might make it difficult for an author to recoup the cost of creating the work, thus discouraging new works. It should not be because somebody decided that transmitting an e-book is technically making a copy. The latter argument assumes that the point of copyright is to protect authors indirectly by protecting the copy-making business directly. It isn't, and it never was.
As much as I respect Lessig, I wish he and other high-profile people who are thrashing out this issue would depart from dissecting the fine points of laws that weren't written with enough resolution to cover current conditions. What they are doing amounts to adding extra zeroes after the decimal point and arguing over the accuracy of the numbers. I wish they would consider that in a very few years, when almost anybody on earth will have the capability to publish their own work to the entire world at practically zero cost. Copyright law of the future should provide an incentive for the people and institutions who PRODUCE new works, not for those who merely make and sell copies.
The major issue with copyright is that instead of defining a principle (an author has the exclusive artistical and revenue rights from the produced works) it just edicts one possible *technical* (hence the word "copy" in "copyright") way to enforce the intents.
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And that technical solution is flawed in several ways
- It is legal to prevent an auhor form getting revenue as long as no copies are made (by lending or reselling a book)
- It is illegal to make copies even if it does not hurt the author revenues (out of print works).
The notions of copies and public performance have greatly evolved during the last decade and the copyright laws are innapropriate.
These flaws were less apparent when copy and distribution were restricted to publishing companies, but now that Internet gives these possibilities to individuals, these flaws are becoming more and more evident.