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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."
The U.S. Supreme Court handed down a unanimous ruling allowing public domain material to be copied without crediting the source. This is a good, if small, thing.
Q:How many libertarians does it take to stop a Panzer division? A:None. Obviously market forces will take care of it.
I'm not sure public domain is so much a matter of ownership but what you can do with it.
If "Happy Birthday To You" were in the public domain, then restaurants could have their staff sing it to you on their birthday without paying for it. That doesn't mean they are necessarily claiming credit for it.
As for Shakespeare, I'd be foolish to claim his work as my own. But since it's in the public domain, I'm free to put together a cast and perform it for the public without paying any royalties to his estate.
If Mickey Mouse is ever PD, then I'll be able to make my own T-shirts and keychains without having to pay Disney any royalties. But nobody will believe me when I say I created Mickey Mouse - and even if I did, he would already be in the PD and someone else can do what they want with him, regardless of my claim.
Remember, with respect to any specific law, the bad guys only have to win once. Their resources are effectively unlimited and they can try again and again and again until an obscure amendment to a law nobody ever heard of or a "must pass" appropriations bill gets added and suddenly. . . it's a bad law.
The best EFF and the rest of the alphabet soup geektivist civil liberties groups can do is fight a holding action.
The reason is that by definition, a non-profit organization can't contribute a single dollar to a political campaign.
We can't beat the bad guys in the long run, without at minimum, having our own top-bracket lobbyists working congressionsal offices, matching them dollar for dollar, having full-time legislative analysts checking EVERY bill and relevant agency regulation for booby-traps, and full-time staff answering phones and opening mail (like the snailmail with our $5 and $20 and $100 contributions) and e-mail and running mailing lists to let us know when it's time to send a message through Congress via their fax gateway.
In other words, we need our own PAC with enough startup budget to set up the infrastructure and do the election commission filings (e.g. FEC) required to legally collect and spend money in DC and each of the 50 states.
This hasn't happened and won't happen. Nobody with the startup money will put it into any "geektivism" organization that isn't tax-deductible, it isn't enough to feel good, the people who can write $1M checks demand tax-writeoffs as well.
If somebody was willing to do the right thing today, it is probably (perhaps the problem can be fixed by throwing a shitload of money at it) too late for a NRA/AARP style PAC to go into business in time to intervene in the 2003-2004 election cycle.
The other option: our high-tech vendors stop doing the "deer in the headlights" thing, stop being hypnotized with the promise of endless profits out of the catalogues of the major content owner members of *AA (MPAA/RIAA) organizations if they only make unbeatable DRM. The promise is bullshit anyway, it depends on fiber bandwidths to every home anyway.
By the time 10Mbps to every US home happens, the vendors will have had to move their R&D and production operations to free countries anyway.
The war is for all practical purposes over in the USA.
The place to make a stand? Probably the EU.
Most countries have publically funded election campaigns, meaning Hollywood can't legally buy politicians and anti-American sentiment is growing. So if you're in the EU and you aren't part of a high-tech political activist group, join one. If you can't find one in your nation, start one. Find people who already know the political game and learn how to play to win.
If the EU doesn't get it, the center of technology development not only moves out of the USA, but out of the Western world to places Hollywood can't buy off. India and China, for instance.
The Chinese are already planning for a future in which the rest of the world buys its tech from them. They are already working on plans for a permanent manned moon base. They are already designing and fabricating their own CPUs.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Copyrights are an artificial construct. From day one. Yes, the creator made them, he owns them, directly on the media he created the idea on. Yes also, anything copied-outside the original, on some sort of physical media, is a copy of an *idea*. Ideas by their very nature are just that, ideas, what came out of humans brains. Ideas get used, and other humans see them, then use them, modify them, combine them with other ideas. This is HOW humans got to be advanced. Joe caveman builds a knapped flint knife. Joe caveman #2 sees this. If #2 steals #1s knife, that is stealing. If #2 sees the design and the technique, then he can build his own knife, then two humans have a knife, two families now have a means to cut food more effectively, to work skins, carve wood into other useful articles, defend the family cave. This is a *good* idea. Joe#2 has used sticks to poke hole in the ground to drop seeds, but the sticks always splinter and break. he tries just the knife, but his arm is too short to get a good enough swing. he gets another idea, ties the knife on the end of the stick, now he has a hoe, perhaps he grows so much that one first year famine for his family and tribe are averted. The ideas have expanded, everyone benefits. Joe #1 played a tune on an old falling down log, sang a little around the fire, and all was well. Joe #2 copied that idea when he went over to the next valley, perhaps it was an icebreaker for him, to show his worth to strangers perhaps, they liked it. Maybe he was a bachelor, and enchanted a new mate, widening the gene pool. His ideas spread, his DNA got more variables. It worked, the concept of idea sharing caught on.
And so forth, to where we are now
Putting restrictions on the sharing of ideas slows down human progress. It is an artificiality that was introduced in the feudal period of human development and society, it was designed to seperate the "classes" to restrict knowledge and enjoyment and ideas in general from "the royals" and "the commoners". Among all things, the "royals" were known for greed and exploitation. That "owning" the ideas let them enjoy that power, to maintain it, but it stagnated our humaness, and created more problems than it solved. It was...wrong. it was an extension of gluttony and greed. It was abnormal before that time. It's a relatively short time period in our human history that "owning" an idea has been considered normal. We have a term for that part of our history, it was the "dark ages", aptly named.
That concept and society, that aspect of feudalism, was and is a flawed civilization. We can recognize that that fork of humaness had serious flaws by merely looking at the historical record. We should strive to get beyond that, we should go back to our roots as humans who cooperated, voluntarily, for everyones mutual benefit, by sharing ideas, and not by force, but just because it's right, and it works better, the idea of sharing ideas IS the better idea, because it has empirical proof that it worked when we did it.. who really wants a return to feudalism? then why should we strive to one of the more heinous aspects of the feudal gestalt? It is illogical.
Our technology is such now, in extremely recent times, that copies of ideas are practically free,effortless, and the sharing far and wide just as easy. It is THE closest thing to a "replicator" we have. This is an amazing time. Would anyone really complain about a material object replicator? I doubt it, if everyone got to use one. It would be so fantastic the inventor would be feted across the planet. So, this complaining by the royal feudal idea owners about our only true replicator is a demand to stay stuck in that sort of archaic feudalism, the dark ages, the age of incredible greed, and incredible want.. That's all it is once you strip away the rhetoric.
Yes, it will cause some adjustment in our world, so have all other advances with technology. This time you would think we might be smart enough to not look this incredible gift horse in the mouth, to take this "idea replicator" and run with it, see where this renaissance of sharing of ideas can take us. Hopefully we can, if we are as smart and as advanced and as civilised as we insist we are.