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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.
Time to scrap the heap of copyright laws and start over (why not begin with what the Constitution says, as a suggestion?). When laws are being created to prevent toddlers from accidentally becoming felons, simply because they want to listen to their teddy bear read them a story, you know things have gotten out of hand.
Look, here at /. we know all about the music (hello, RIAA!), movies (hello, MPAA!) and software (hello, UCITA!) examples. But here is an example that is just absurd. Fix the problem? Please, just gut the laws and start over.
Wait a minute, what am I saying?! Any laws rewritten from scratch nowadays would be far more draconian. Maybe this time they would put in provisions to haul the 3-year-olds off to prison...
What does the government expect? Copyright laws have not been properly developed and then updated independently of the interests of those with influence (read: money) but have instead been accumulated over time by gradual accretion. Is it really any surprise then that they parallel other equally confusing works such as James Joyce's Ulysses, developed in an identical way. Copyright law started out as making some sense for the purpose of protecting an artist's rights while allowing public domain material to say public domain. Now they continuously tinker with it. Rich organisations constantly press for nonsensical and exact new stipulations, and because people try to exploit every loophole at every opportunity because of this they have to introduce even more arbitrary limits:
What bullshit! The thing that makes this even worse is that this isn't unusual: it's just a microcosm of law these days: a series of idiotic and numerically precise restrictions with no justification suffering from excessive detail with every little fucking detail having to be dictated due to the foolhardy allowance given for defence lawyers in exploiting any undefined part of each law.
Bash script for FP whores
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.
Copyright law is in the US Constitution, but the ridiculous stuff is in the law (passed by Congress) and the regulations (enacted by 'mere' regulators.) You don't need a constitutional amendment, you need intelligent government. ... sorry ... worldwide shortage of that.
If you think deeply enough, you will have no single direction for your outrage.
There are too many wealthy vested interests in copyright law that change at this stage is nearly impossible. The interconnectedness of laws and elections and corporations make the changing of the law to include more logic and coherancy is impossible.
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.
The monied corps don't want to change them because the ambiguity helps their cases as they can just throw money at lawyers and the courts in order to win their cases.
The politicians don't want to change them because they are paid well for opposing such changes.
Therefore, the only people who want them changed are people like you and me... The ones who are informed and see the problem. The only thing is that we are a small minority of the voting public.
MMORPG fan-boy? Prove your worth
Credit for ideas, yes. Laws that are microscopic in detail and miss the actual target are hated.
If you think deeply enough, you will have no single direction for your outrage.
Microsoft Windows's "Network Neighborhood" feature, for example, is simply a way to swap files. Almost every software application that capitalizes on this central functionality is therefore a Kinko's of sorts, and decreeing all search-and-copy software to be illegal is simply too sweeping a move for a court to make.
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 ?
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
" 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."
Unfortunately, though this would be th easiest of solutions to implement, it would never pass...
-ISP's and their users would complain that it's a "tax", and would fight it to the end.
-Artists with big followings (U2, Garth Brooks, Pink Floyd, etc etc) would complain that this method shortchanges them in revenues. Bands and record companies fight it to the end.
We're not going to get rid of copyright, and we're not going to get rid of DRM at this point either. Instead of splitting our energies and efforts, we should be focusing on getting two things done...
-Lobbying Congress with all of our might to have copyright terms reduced to a reasonable exemption. Either a set term, like 20 years, or the lifetime of the artists. No extensions beyond that.
-Pressuring record companies through a campaign of public relations and a music boycott to get an Apple Store-like solution up for all copyrighted music at reasonable rates, like 99 cents a song. And this pressure should not include copyright violations. That destroys any moral credibility we may have.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
You have 4 ways to protect essentially the same thing.
Copyright
Trademark
Patent
Trade Secret
The rules governing them overlap, contradict and in the case of patent are usually poorly applied(prior art).
Toss in 200 years of technological progress that have reduced difficult or impossible tasks to completely trivial tasks. (Publishing books, reproducing music, etc)
Add in the fact that the laws were originally designed to deal with works that were matters of entertainment or education now deal with pedestrian business tools. (Theres not many businesses that will stop because a copyrighted book is unavailable. Theres quite a few that will stop if the copy protection on their software goes bezerk).
My point is it took a Harvard Law prof. to figure out the system is broke ? The only people its not broke for are the I.P. lawyers and for them its a license to extort money.
They? Who is this mysterious they? Think about what you're saying. You're thinking of some specific people who you feel have abused copyright and proposing a change in the system to punish them. However, your solution would quickly screw over anyone who creates unique material and doesn't get it immediately to market. The result would likely be that the large conglomerates which you're targetting would be the only way an author, an artist, a poet, or a composer could hope to do make a living. Everyone would need a massive advertising splurge to push interest for a month, create the newest fad, and sell all that's possible in the miniscule window of two years.
And that's ignoring the fact that the GPL exists only under the auspices of copyright. You'd destroy that too. Such a proposal as you've made is completely short-sighted.
You like splinters in your crotch? -Jon Caldara
This raises an interesting question. turnitin claims to detect plagiarism in essays turned in by students. But those essays are then stored by turnitin in order to detect future plagiarism (of course since we can't track the use of the essay, I have wondered if turnitin isn't feeding the essays out to one of the essay sales sites). If the essay is copyright by the author, this seems to me to be out of the realm of fair use. Perhaps a few students should go after turnitin in the courts.
Plagiarism is copying work from others and publishing it als your own (i.e. pretend it is entirely your own work). It is like renaming a metallica mp3 as Sardonis\'_Hefty_Metal_Band-Roll_Now.mp3 (or whatever) and pretending I wrote the music/text and did the performance, recording, mixing, etc.
Copyright infringers copy a work without permission, but usually give lots of credit. Someone sharing mp3's from metallica is usually quite upfront about the fact that they are made by metallica.
That original law was perfectly adequate to encourage authors and artists to keep creating. It was always done for the benefit of society as a whole, not a few greedy profiteers. It did not create "intellectual property", a highly offensive misnomer, it created a temporary loan from the public domain, to which all ideas belong once expressed. There is similar language in the laws of many other countries. Copyright extentions have totally ruined the purpose of copyright to the point that just undoing them may not fix it any more. Perhaps copyright should simply be abolished. Yes, that would take an amendment, but overturning extentions would only take simple legislation. Too bad the greedy profiteers who oppose it own congress. We need to vote the bums out!
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
Some (maybe all) people have to pay a small fee every time the get their cable bill which claims to be a 'copyright infringement' fee. The idea here is that some people will copy/record what they watch and therefore the producers of that material must be paid for this infringement. So this assumes that everyone that has cable is breaking the law and so they must pay. So does this mean that if I'm already guilty of the crime I might as well do it, what about innocence before guilt? Does this seam backwards to anyone else?
-Tim Louden
Oh, really? Well, you're an infringer. You see, you've made a copy of the slashdot article and probably of the main article, too. You didn't get the explicit permission of the copyright holder, either. And maybe you've covered your dirty little crime by clearing your browser's cache, but the fact remains: To have read the article at all, you had to willfully cause to be created a copy of that article.
Ludicrous? Sure. Implicit in the whole idea of how the Net and the Web work? Certainly. In contradiction of "traditional" copyright? Without a doubt.
And before you unload on me, consider that (a) Congress had to add language providing for "emphemeral" copies and (b) the Copyright Cartel fought tooth-and-nail to stop such language from being added.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach