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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."
http://www.eldred.cc/eablog/000074.html
e;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
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)
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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."