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Jonathan Zittrain On The Spiderweb of Copyright Law
Jonathan Zittrain, director of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, takes an unusual approach to critiquing copyright in this Legal Affairs article. He explains with an analogy to the bizarre patchwork of United States tax codes a reason that (in the words of one of Zittrain's colleagues) "all the cyberprofs hate copyright." It goes beyond simple indignation that current copyright laws often grant seemingly unfair monopoly powers, and into the tangled minutia of the laws themselves.
Seems like most early posters didn't really read the article. Okay, a summation:
/. ain't for the ignorant, so stop letting yourself be excluded (aka ignored)!
1. Copyright law was never meant to apply to the individual
2. It does now
3. It is way too specific in some areas, but not specific enough in others.
4. It often stifles creativity, but when used correctly, it encourages it.
5. Copyright law is NOT BAD, just our implementation of it.
so... conclusion:
Add some sort of "fee" to our taxes (maybe just on ISPs, more like on everyone) that allows us, as individuals, to use any copyrighted material we want, as long as we don't try to sell it, without robbing the owners of the copyright - cause we are paying them.
I like it...
By the way... read the damn article before posting.
Now of course, I'm not suggesting that y'all start firing up windows, but I find this point really intriguing - filesharing using the SMB protocol over port 139 a'la redmond. What (c|w)ould the RIAA do about that ?
Has been done. A company called scour.com used to use SMB. It got sued by the MPAA and RIAA and NMPA and subsequently went bankrupt.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
The lawyers don't want change even though they see the problems everyday since it will keep more cases out of court and decrease their job opportunities.
I disagree. Lawyers actually tend to argue for or against copyright on policy arguments. Some lawyers think that copyright can be a good thing if it meets certain criteria. Others feel it's like a property right and ought to be inherent.
But I've never heard of any lawyer arguing for copyrights just so that they can stay in work.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Not really. Trade secrets and patents are mutually exclusive. And trade secrets can protect things that no patent could ever be granted for. Copyrights and patents are also mutually exclusive. And trademarks cannot be trade secrets or copyrighted, and it would be quite a stretch to try for even a design patent on a trademark.
Really they're all quite different types of protection, with different origins, and the policies behind them are different as well. That's why it's so silly to lump them together as IP law.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
"Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" comes from the Declaration of Independence, not the constitution. Despite what your average yahoo thinks, they are not the same document. Unlike the Constitution, which is the basis of our body of laws, the Declaration is not part of the body of laws, just a philosophical treatise. So there!
How ya like dat?
The Founding Fathers did not just come up with copyright as a "great idea" to increase innovation. They did so as a solution to some common problems of those days.
The first problem was publishing of books. Few could afford to distribute information (publishers), and it was not worthwhile to publish a book, if all the competing publishers could just sell the same book as well.
This is the well known problem, and not really relevant these days - when distribution of information is a non-issue.
Another problem copyright solved is still relevant today. At the time, there was a profession of very hard and lengthy work - that of drawing maps. Map Makers worked for long periods of times to create accurate maps of many regions. Such boring and expensive tasks would only be done well for a promise of profit.
What map makers did - was sign NDA's and sell their maps under them. This meant that the spread of information was limited, never went public and inspired no new works.
Thus, copyright was created as a protected way to distribute information more openly. Its actually the openness and extra usability of copyrighted information that was so great at the time.
These days, copyrights have deteriorated into laws that are almost as bad as NDA'd distribution of information for map-like (software) products, and much worse for every-day information (books, etc.)
In summary, my point is that if you cancel copyright, the spread of information will be again limited by NDA's (you won't really outlaw those, will you?) rather than copyright. In the case of good copyright laws, this is much, much worse.
Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution is simply an enumeration of some of the powers granted to the Legislative Branch. In other words, it simply is a grant to the Congress of the power to pass a Copyright Act -- it does not require one. This is a point long-settled by the Supreme Court -- there is no right of an author, under the Constitution or otherwise, to any exclusive rights in Copyright, unless and until the Congress says so.
There once existed a means to achieve needed intellectual goods, namely the University, but that institution is now a mere handmaiden to market interests. Of course, with the creative output of academia now hobbled by "market relevance" and special interest lobbies, no engine of intellectual freedom is left. So of course, public policy has to shift toward strengthened intellectual property law. Hence as universities weaken and academic freedom erodes, there is a corresponding rise in the breadth and venom of intellectual property protection.
To cite one example, Richard Stallman created the Free Software Foundation as a reaction to the commercialization of academic research. Perhaps there would be no Free Software movement at all if our universities were as strong and free as they ought to be. Nor, of course would there be the current boundless monopolies in intellectual property that have moved in to fill the void left by the death of academia. The university has let its proper role in society be usurped by charlatans.