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Copyright Defeats?
Uruk asks: "Over the last few years, we've seen what looks like the victory of copyright and business interest at the expense of the consumer. There's been The DMCA, the UCITA, all of the legal wranging over DeCSS, and so on. Copyright holders can even shut your website down without doing the research about whether or not it was appropriate. Johansen did seem to be acquited of some of what was brought against him as a result of the DeCSS situation, but that was in Norway. Does anyone know of any copyright or consumer victories on the net in the last few years? Something that limits the abilities of these laws, or otherwise acts in the copyright spirit of free use? My hat is off to GNU and EFF, even Project Gutenberg. What is the status of this ongoing battle? I'm looking for the sunny side to a situation that seems littered with defeat."
I'm thinking that the MPAA is infringing on my copyrights on their web site. The MPAA itself has gone to considerable expense and trouble to relieve me of any and all responsibility for actually investigating that they have, and their ISP is in deep, deep shit if they don't treat the MPAA just like any other accused war criminal/infringer, if I were to complain. It'd be real interesting to see if their host has honored any takedown orders from the MPAA, before filing such an order against the MPAA itself.
But that'd be fighting abuse with abuse, and I'd never recommend doing that.
The biggest consumer victory over the last years isn't really related to copyright. It's the whole Internet in general.
Cheap, high speed cable access. Almost everyone has an email address these days, even my mum has two.
Even taking into account the enormous amount of crap out there, viruses, script-kiddies, etc, there is still an enormous amount of fantastic and free (as in beer and speech) software for the taking, useful information, online dictionaries - you can find something for almost every subject.
The dot com bubble spoiled (or educated depending on your view) people to expect things for free, but the biggest consumer victory is the wealth of information and content available to all who seek it.
Those who are old enough, try and remember the time before you had regular internet access.
Yes, people may be clamping down on copyrights, yes there are idiotic patents out there, and Microsoft is currently pouring money into nanotechnology in an attempt to turn humanity into a "perfect" society.
On balance the "good internet" outweighs the bad (at least for now). Having that resource available beats the shit out of being able to download the latest Britney Spears mp3. (as in fact would repeatedly punching yourself in the nuts, but you get the idea)
I think it is high time to realize how naive we were to ever think that the courts would straighten this out for us. The courts are the least democratic, most reactionary, and least progressive element of government - and while they have done good (especially in America due the fantastic foresight of the framers, which has unfortunately reached its tether now) trying to think that we can turn to them for deliverance of the Internet is insanity.
I think, however, that the widespread belief among many of the information freedom activists and supporters that the courts would work things out (in the Eldred case, the DeCSS case, the Napster case, etc) should be noted as very strong evidence to the fundamental honesty of their position. It is so clear and obvious to us that laws forbidding us from manipulating our own computers and lawsuits against networks for not controlling those that use them are an insanity and step all over our fundamental freedoms that the otherwise naive belief that the courts would side with us seemed not only logical but necessary.
So is not the case. The unconnected man, the information horder, and those who view computers with suspicion and fear simply do not see the same thing as we do when they look at these things. Fundamental shifts will occur when one group grows at the expense of the other, not sooner.
If a student copies Shakespeare, and claims it as their own original work, it is plaigerism, and by tradition, they will get a failure on whatever assignment they plagierized on. Here, the public domain appears at first glance to be open to legal plagiarism.
So then, this opens the debate: Is public plagiarism of public domain works a bad thing? If it could lead to new copyrights on old work, then it is definetly a bad thing for the public good... but if no evidence survived to show that the public domain work exists now in the public domain, is it not better that at least someone preserved the work, even if just to own it for life+x years? After all, the ownership of a work in the public domain cannot be defended in court, which makes the copyright directly on the work nearly useless.
There will likely be some interesting cases that come forth from this ruling, and what happens afterward.
Ryan Fenton
The victories are everywhere, but no matter how good it gets most folks seem to be focused on what they want. Well, if you know how to get everything you want, right now in real life then do clue us in so we can get on with the rest of it. In the meantime we've got to look at what we got and where we got it.
Example: my father is in his 80's; my 20+ aunts and uncles are nearly all dead. And all through those Nixon years and the Carter years and even the Reagan years I remember many an afternoon having to listen to them sit around and bitch about corrupt politicians and (get ready) an out of control press that had way too much freedom and power. Two decades later and this nation of sheeple elects a candidate who told us during his campaign he thought "maybe we have too much freedom."
This is the generation that forged the corporate nonsense we are living with now; this is the generation that put most of these corrupt fuckers in office, that passed most of these corrupt laws. And yet, in spite of their best efforts we now have a nearly unlimited, worldwide press, the ability to exchange copyrighted media and culture in the blink of an eye, and (believe it or not) more voice than ever - but we need to learn to use it on real shit instead of squandering it on essentially meaningless yellow press nonsense like "who gave the president a blowjob." Trent Lott was a good example of a move in the right direction - and I don't know how many of you noticed, but even CBS (er, viacom) and ABC (I mean Disney) were, in the end, forced to give some face time to chairman Mike's idiocy.
Most of these laws you all wring your hands over have become essentially meaningless for private individuals (and especially for indivduals who have an iota of technical knowledge). The victories are all around us, every day.
And speaking of which: I gotta run now; Dog Eat Dog is on...