Slashdot Mirror
The Tyranny of Copyright?
Pinky3 writes "The Sunday New York Times Magazine has a long article entitled The Tyranny of Copyright? Views of both supporters of CopyLeft (Lessig and Zittrain) and Copyright (Ginsberg and Goldstein) are laid out. The article constrasts the cultural commons to the 'permission culture" and covers the unintended consequences of various US laws passed long ago." Dear NYT editors: "Copy Left" really shouldn't have a space in it. Thanks.
If you have some moral compunction against using an affiliate link, please have the decency to inform unwitting readers that they won't get any closer to the actual article by clicking on the provided link than they would by leaving Slashdot, going to news.google.com, searching for and executing the link there.
You don't have to register with the NYT.
With the following procedure, you can read any NYT article:
I suspect this works because the NYT sees google as the referrer.
If only I could come up with a good sig
Here's the text of the article:
The Tyranny of Copyright?
By ROBERT S. BOYNTON
Published: January 25, 2004
ast fall, a group of civic-minded students at Swarthmore College received a sobering lesson in the future of political protest. They had come into possession of some 15,000 e-mail messages and memos -- presumably leaked or stolen -- from Diebold Election Systems, the largest maker of electronic voting machines in the country. The memos featured Diebold employees' candid discussion of flaws in the company's software and warnings that the computer network was poorly protected from hackers. In light of the chaotic 2000 presidential election, the Swarthmore students decided that this information shouldn't be kept from the public. Like aspiring Daniel Ellsbergs with their would-be Pentagon Papers, they posted the files on the Internet, declaring the act a form of electronic whistle-blowing.
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Unfortunately for the students, their actions ran afoul of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (D.M.C.A.), one of several recent laws that regulate intellectual property and are quietly reshaping the culture. Designed to protect copyrighted material on the Web, the act makes it possible for an Internet service provider to be liable for the material posted by its users -- an extraordinary burden that providers of phone service, by contrast, do not share. Under the law, if an aggrieved party (Diebold, say) threatens to sue an Internet service provider over the content of a subscriber's Web site, the provider can avoid liability simply by removing the offending material. Since the mere threat of a lawsuit is usually enough to scare most providers into submission, the law effectively gives private parties veto power over much of the information published online -- as the Swarthmore students would soon learn.
Not long after the students posted the memos, Diebold sent letters to Swarthmore charging the students with copyright infringement and demanding that the material be removed from the students' Web page, which was hosted on the college's server. Swarthmore complied. The question of whether the students were within their rights to post the memos was essentially moot: thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, their speech could be silenced without the benefit of actual lawsuits, public hearings, judges or other niceties of due process.
After persistent challenges by the students -- and a considerable amount of negative publicity for Diebold -- in November the company agreed not to sue. To the delight of the students' supporters, the memos are now back on their Web site. But to proponents of free speech on the Internet, the story remains a chilling one.
Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media scholar at New York University, calls anecdotes like this ''copyright horror stories,'' and there have been a growing number of them over the past few years. Once a dry and seemingly mechanical area of the American legal system, intellectual property law can now be found at the center of major disputes in the arts, sciences and -- as in the Diebold case -- politics. Recent cases have involved everything from attempts to force the Girl Scouts to pay royalties for singing songs around campfires to the infringement suit brought by the estate of Margaret Mitchell against the publishers of Alice Randall's book ''The Wind Done Gone'' (which tells the story of Mitchell's ''Gone With the Wind'' from a slave's perspective) to corporations like Celera Genomics filing for patents for human genes. The most publicized development came in September, when the Recording Industry Association of America began suing music downloaders for copyright infringement, reaching out-of-court settlements for thousands of dollars with defendants as young as 12. And in November, a group of independent film producers went to court to fight a ban, imposed this year by the Motion Picture Association of America, on sending DVD's to those who vote for annual film awards.
Not long ago, the Interne
I have discovered a truly marvelous
Dr. Lessig doesn't want to abolish copyright. He merely wants to find some way around the draconian restrictions on derivative works. Such restrictions lead to injustices such as Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music, 420 F. Supp. 177 (S.D.N.Y. 1976), which held that subconscious copying of a copyrighted work is actionable infringement.
Or do you claim that authors create works in a vacuum?
They were in no copyright trouble to begin with. No re-phrasing was needed, The problem was the lawsuit scared the ISP.
Here's a really good question. Were those e-mails creative? I sure as hell don't consider my e-mails creative works (well, a couple times I've e-mailed poems or story excerpts). If they do not have creative value, they don't get copyright, so the students were fine with what they did.
Now, taking my e-mails and posting them is a privacy violation, but that's another matter.
As for what I just wrote, it's a little iffy. It is a position piece, and does have original phrasing and political value. I think it is well within fair use to repost it freely, so long as due credit is given.
Ging-gang-google gave me this article from the website of the school of Law at UKMC.
Apparently what happened was that the American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers (ASCAP) sent letters out in 1996 to camps - including Girl Scout ones - demanding they pay fees for singing any of their copyrighted songs (such as Edelweiss and Puff the Magic Dragon), saying, "They buy paper, twine and glue for their crafts - they can pay for the music, too. If offenders keep singing without paying, we will sue them if necessary."
Later they claimed that they hadn't meant to target Girl Scouts, just other camps - "the sort that bring in bands for square dances, have music by the pool ... and are like sending your kid to a resort."
Actually they were in violation of copyright and I question why the DMCA was involved at all. Written communcations are copyrighted and in this case since they are considered work-for-hire Diebold holds that copyright. Reproducing them or making them available for download is a copyright violation, given the five basic rights protected by copyright law.
Actually they were in violation of copyright
News reporting. Non-profit. Factual. Does not substitute for the work itself. Any competent lawyer could make a good fair use defense.
and I question why the DMCA was involved at all.
In this case, the DMCA merely codifies a cease-and-desist process in 17 USC 512. It has nothing to do with the DMCA that interferes with interoperability (17 USC 1201; judges have tended to ignore 1201(f)) except for having been enacted in the same bill.
If someone copyrights some of their code, they didnt invent the language (eg c) and they didnt invent many of the functions that the program does (eg printing to the screen) and they certainly didnt invent the compiler or the CPU that the program runs under and they had nothing to do even with the storage medium their program is on (hd/cdrom/paper)! Now i can kind of understand the ownership of ideas eg a method of selecting some information which causes relevent information to be revealed, but even that is based on the idea of "information" and human thought so you cant say thats something original. So what exactly denotes something original? and why should you be able to copyright something thats not original for far longer than is needed to create incentive? (eg 70 years after your death!)
Quite simply this:
They're not trying to copyright the language.
They're not trying to copyright the functions the program uses.
They're not trying to copyright the CPU or the compiler that the program runs under.
They're not trying to copyright the storage medium.
They are copyrighting the code that they wrote.
I can't imagine why you didn't understand this from the get-go. It's plainly obvious.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
scripsit Frater 219:
Actually, the idea that private property is a government-created monopoly is not just an anarchist idea. Without taking a stand on whether it is a good thing or not, it is pretty clearly something that doesn't exist without state enforcement. It's important to distinguish ``property'' in the sense of ``my stuff'' from ``property'' in the sense of something that remains mine whether or not it's in my actual possession or use, and which I can have legal recourse to regain if I lose. The latter is what is provided by the state, not the former. (Many versions of socialist thought, BTW, make this distinction, too. Your house, your computer, your trousers are yours, it's just things like factories and farmland you don't farm yourself that you can't own.)
These ideas are also based on the idea that property is primarily land. In order to have claim to land that you're not actually using (for example, holding for speculation or renting to tenants), you have to have a state to enforce it -- or you have to have a private army in an anarchic situation. This is what Hobbes was referring to in his famous ``nasty, brutish, and short'' quote: without a state you would never get anything done, because you would have to waste all your effort employing violence to keep hold of your goods and land.
What you're calling ``left anarchists'' would hold that the state enforcement required to keep hold of property that is being rented by others (or simply in disuse) is oppressive. The idea is that if you're not actually using it, you don't really need it, and you're only using the state to squeeze wealth out of the people who really do need it.
In principio creauit Linus Linucem.
Misplaced agression.
The problem isn't the existence of copyright, it is the abuse of the idea.
If there were no copyright, there would be no GPL either (the GPL depends on copyright for its ability to force sharing).
Copyrights that run for 7 generations, chilled political debates, supression of even discussions about encryption algorithms, and forcing the removal of entire websites without sending so much as a sniff past a judge are things that would probably leave Jefferson et.al. spinning in their graves.
From the article:
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
I understand that many slashdotters think that the New York times (and other newspapers... I believe the Washington Times does this as well) is an evil evil newspaper because it forces you to register to view articles online.
There is no dark evil purpose in this. The reason is circulation. Newspapers include online views in their circulation numbers so that they can charge more per ad. However, advertisers got keen to this and realized that online statistics were almost always inflated (does it count refreshes? does it count each graphic as a separate hit? does it count the same ip viewing different articles as seperate hits? the list goes on.) As a result, the NY Times has instituted this so that they can better gauge the number of readers of their online paper.
There is no secret Orwellian doctrine at the NY Times. You can take off your tin foil hats now.
The NYT has a bunch of rules about how names are presented - like, no InterCap names, no Punctuation! in names, an allergy to acronyms (HP is typically spelled out Hewlett Packard, and then the Packard bit is dropped; I note that IBM doesn't have this problem), etc.
So, call it Copyleft and you're fine.
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."
Thomas Jefferson
It's interesting that parody falls under fair use rather than derivative work, actually. But if "Gone With the Wind", first published in 1936, had it's copyright expire, any sequel or derivative work, parody or otherwise, would be allowed.
This sig intentionally left justified.
Um, this is already partially implemented in Canada. We pay a levy on recordable media, and as a result downloading is legal. Supposedly, the levy is supposed to go to the artists and recording industry. The only thing missing is the "central office", otherwise it is very much like Fisher's concept. And I hardly think Canada qualifies as a second world country.
Would making this kind of contribution accessible to the general public at a generic price better mankind? Certainly. But would this happen? Never.
Yes it would be a better world today, but not in ten years because the med companies wouldn't have the cash to pay research of new medicine. eg no cure for new decieses would be invented.
"Nobody really checks their email any more. They just delete their spam"
(chuckle)
yes, foreword.
thanks.
La via sola al paradiso incommincia nel inferno
Source: GNU Project - Misinterpreting Copyright. Technically, I think the copyright notice was part of the "this notice" that needed to be preserved.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
I apologize for responding to your intended rhetoric question, but, yes, yes I can. The drug is called Insulin, and it's used in the treatment of diabetes. Dr. Frederick Banting sold the patent on the idea to the University of Toronto for exactly $1 (Canadian funds, no less), such that it could be produced cheaply for all those with diabetes.
Source: Government of Canada Digital Collections Archive
But Maaa! Everyone else has a