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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."
Reistance is futile. Hillary Rosen will copyright your children's DNA and patent the cold virus they catch that makes them sick.
Expect to pay licensing fees when you make a baby or catch a cold.
http://www.eldred.cc/eablog/000074.html
e;I know of a copyright winner, it was this company named ____________
Copyrighted name though, can't talk about it.
The sunny side is that with Kazaa, Direct Connect, etc I've managed to fill up several hard drives worth of copyrighted material that keeps me quite happily entertained!
Victory is ours! muhahahaha
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.
RIAA/MPAA lose suit against Streamcast/Grokster.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-978176.html
I thought this was pretty big!!
I'd hardly call the UCITA a "defeat". Yeah, it passed in a couple states where it was rushed through, but in all the others it's met stiff resistance and is stalled or dead.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
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)
Hey, c'mon, how can CNN be expected to cover a minor story like that when Martha Stewart is about to be indicted?
This post is dedicated to all of those
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
Gutenberg can burn through near as much time as can Slashdot. Though so many of us are avid readers, probably too few of us take time to read the occasional classic; Gutenberg is well stocked, and with a selection of texts that will have you quoting circles around pretentious arts majors.
/me breaks into song.
Slashdot humor is more often more similar to humor of days past: word play, teasing, rabid character assassinations. Many of these classics are authored with the intent of communicating new found theory and thought- things that we'd like to think are right up our way.
Beyond the intrinsic value of this sizable collection, reading texts that are in the public domain, thereby avoiding those that are not, is a most Excellent ***FINGER*** for the dip-shits who would deny us OUR rights to information that our ancestors would have rather have published for all.
Progress requires that we build on prior works. If reading old literature helps get the message across that we've enough with excessive copyright...
http://www.eff.org/bernstein/
http://cr.yp.to/export.html
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-225508.html?legacy=c net
In a 2-to-1 vote, a federal panel affirmed U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel's 1997 landmark ruling in Daniel Bernstein vs. the Justice Department. That decision states that software source code is a language, and therefore the export controls violate the University of Illinois math professor's First Amendment right.------ Michael A. Romig
Not strictly copyright, but still IP related, is the patenting of the SARS genome by the BC Cancer Institute to ensure its availability for all. Whether doing this was a victory, or the necessity of having to do it a defeat, I leave up to you....
Maybe if there is some way to collect an informal archive about unjustified attempts to claim enforcement of copyrights
Would that be the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse?
Will I retire or break 10K?
As for how the footage came into the public domain, they never renewed the copyright, and it expired in 1977.
No one has really explained in detail what the case was about. Fox hired Time to produce a TV series based on a book. It was originally broadcast in 1949 and the copyright expired in 1977. Fox never bothered to renew the copyright. Dastar purchased copies of the original, public domain series, edited the footage, and sold it under their own name.
Fox complained, of course. They used the theory that, by selling the tapes and not revealing the original source of the footage, they were "reverse passing off" the footage as their own, a violation of the unfair trade practices act.
The court did not want to use trademark law to interfere with copyright law, and found for Dastar.
I guess "cheap" is relative, but I consider $500+ per year for a cable modem to be just this side of extortion. I'll admit I don't know what their costs are, but every time they jack my cable TV bill, they claim it's to cover the increased cost of programming. Can't use that excuse for internet access. The fact is as long as the cable and phone companies have a near-monopoly on high-speed access, we consumers are screwed.
I do agree with you about the "good internet", and Britney Spears.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
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
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...
Creators deserve to be compensated.
I just dug a very deep hole, and filled it in again, neatly. I worked very hard. I deserve to be compensated.
As an absolute principle, ``Creators deserve to be compensated.'' is flawed. The rule is ``Arbeit macht mudes'', not ``Abeit macht Geld''.
See what I've been reading.
Church of Scientology recently threatened Google in court and got a judge to issue temporary cease-and-desist order to make Google to eliminate the objectionable (=critical) sites from its search engine, because displaying materials to which COS owns copyright. Google was scared and took the links down temporarily, then restored most of them (which did not display the copyrighted secrets - just provided links to them) and as a bonus Google published a court document containing a complete list of COS-objectionable sites with their explanation.
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
Also check out Lawrence Lessig's weblog for up-to-the-minute happenings in the good fight. (and for the extremely lazy, here's his RDF feed.
And ( if that weren't links enough) you should go and sign the petition to Reclaim the Public Domain.
yrs trly, linky karma whore
"What thou shalt not, I shalt did!" -Bart Simpson
You may recall that /. covered the ruling in favour of an Australian who was selling PS2 modchips. He still got caught on trademark infringement, but nevertheless modchipping a PS2 is now legal in this country.
Some quick googling turned up this link which pretty much explains the situation.
The DMCA can't touch us if we all live Down Under.
For a little while. Until we join the Coalition of the Willing-To-Suppress-Basic-Freedoms.
Can you imagine how industrious and well-disciplined the first few people must have been?
I have been pwned because my
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.
And, to beat the reply posts:
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
The court held that photographing a 2D public domain image does not create a new copyright. It lacks sufficient originality. This follows the well-known Feist vs. Rural Telephone, which established that mere lists, like phone directories, are not original works. (As the Supreme Court wrote, "The threshold for originality in copyright law is low, but it exists.")
As a result, you can now put clip art of out-of-copyright material on your web site.
Corbis is trying to get around this. They add watermarking data to an image and then copyright the watermarking data. They then claim that the DMCA prohibits the removal of the watermarking data, even though the underlying image is not copyrighted. This needs to be litigated.
I suggest moving your business elsewhere. There's nothing that will get dumb draconian laws repealed faster than all websites operations moving overseas, where (hopefully) the grubby hands of the DMCA et al can't reach them. The American govt care about the economy more than anything else, and if they see an e-commerce drain to other countries, they might be prepared to change the situation. But whilst all you entrepreneurs are still starting up in the good old U S of A, why would they bother to change anything?
== Jez ==
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