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.
That's because this is a NYT article. Please give everyone 30 minutes to complete their registration form.
/.-ers are reading the articles before posting. I don't think so...... :)
But then you assume
Browsers shouldn't have a back button!! It's all about going forward...
CopyLEFT says: We're going to Maine! and Pennsylvania! and Arkansas! and Ohio! and Michigan! and New Hampshire! aieeeeeaaaaaaaa!!!!!
CopyRIGHT says: duh...We have strategerie ha ha ha
CopyLEFT says: You might think you know where the lockbox is, and maybe you do. Or maybe that's a dummy, or a decoy lockbox. Only me and Tipper and the Secretary of Defense will know for sure.
they actually took the term "copyleft" and modified it, be thankful that they are re-distributing their "copy left" spaced variation for the benefit of the community.
"Dear NYT editors: 'Copy Left' really shouldn't have a space in it. Thanks."
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.
They have a space in there because they are not talking about "copyleft" as in licensing, but rather "the Copy Left" as in "the Left" as in the political category.
I'm not sure that it's accurate to lump everyone who's opposed to the current copyright schemes together as "leftists," which seems to be the implication. Indeed, one would think that a return to a 14 + 14 "founder's copyright" would be not so much radical as reactionary.
Hopefully this indicates that the media is starting to understand that there can be another way. Free software and truly open standards will never become widely adopted while the mainstream view is "how can anything with little or no copyright restrictions be any good?"
If there were no copyrights, you can bet the NYT would not be putting content on the Internat unless it was protected with DRM.
Do we think anyone but geeks really cares? The public can't be bothered to care about anything that isn't spoon fed to them on Entertainment Tonight or in People magazine. We need to make the fight against excessive corporate copyright an entertaining battle or no one will pay attention. How about getting JLo for a spokesperson?
That's a key point. Without copyrights (rights for the person who created the work to retain it) there would be a serious elitist imbalance of information access. Only trusted individuals would have access to various types of information and some types of information would never be disclosed, or possiblu even recorded. People are human and want recognition for their work and ideas. Copyrights (even to the extreme that they have been taken to today) are the lesser evil in this matter.
The article uses highly emotive words in the headline, "Tyranny" is almost guaranteed to get more than a casual glance, but the body is pretty factual (although sympathetic to the students, for example). Well written - articles like this are the only way that the rights-restrictions will get wider coverage. It's a good thing to have a free-from-tyranny press :-)
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
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
Why do they have to lump together the people who want the DMCA repealed with those who require some state subsidized artist payment. I just want my fair use rights back, I don't need some nutty scheme that forces artists to share their music and taxes me on CD-r's.
" The money would come from a tax on various content-related devices, like DVD burners, blank CD's or digital recorders"
I can't believe the copyleft is saying things like that. That is not a reasonable compromise for me to get my fair-use rights back.
Copyright protection encourages creation.
Lessig maintains that overbroad restrictions on preparing derivative works discourages creation.
Nobody else has any right to works I've created.
What did you draw on when creating works? Or did you claim that you created works in a vacuum?
People are human and want recognition for their work and ideas.
Another human attribute which occurs from time to time is that they don't care about recognition, they just want to spread their ideas for the betterment or enjoyment of all mankind.
MORTAR COMBAT!
The interesting thing about the article is the use of copyright to try and silence criticism of the Diebold system.
Before jumping on the repeal property rights bandwagon, we should note that the Swathmore students could have easily gotten around the copyright issue by paraphrasing and writing their own original work drawn from the emails.
The article paints this issue as horrible corporate America positioned against wonderful students. However, I see a lot of issues going on beyond publication. For example, there is the issue of open communications within a corporation. If there is no legal protection for open internal discussions about a product, then companies will have no choice but to limit open dialog within the company.
Shouldn't Diebold be commended for having an open internal communication system that allows its workers to actively criticize and tear apart their company's product? If any document stolen from a company could be published to paint the company in bad light, then we would see companies cracking down on the open internal communications needed to improve products.
Having been involved in several projects, I've written and have read extremely critical emails about different aspects of a program. The purpose of these communications is generally to improve the quality of a program. Strongly worded emails generally have a better chance of making it into a product. Often the strongly worded emails are bunk. If all of the test documentation of the Alpha and design systems got published then we could make any company look horrible.
I rue the day when each and every word written in internal communications has to be polished into marketing material.
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?
Something strange and dangerous is happening in copyright law. Under the U.S. Constitution, copyright exists to benefit users -- those who read books, listen to music, watch movies, or run software -- not for the sake of publishers or authors. Yet even as people tend increasingly to reject and disobey the copyright restrictions imposed on them "for their own benefit," the U.S. government is adding more restrictions, and trying to frighten the public into obedience with harsh new penalties.
How did copyright policies come to be diametrically opposed to their stated purpose? And how can we bring them back into alignment with that purpose? To understand, we should start by looking at the root of United States copyright law: the U.S. Constitution.
Copyright in the U.S. Constitution
When the U.S. Constitution was drafted, the idea that authors were entitled to a copyright monopoly was proposed -- and rejected. The founders of our country adopted a different premise, that copyright is not a natural right of authors, but an artificial concession made to them for the sake of progress. The Constitution gives permission for a copyright system with this paragraph (Article I, Section 8):
[Congress shall have the power] to promote the progress of science and the useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that promoting progress means benefit for the users of copyrighted works. For example, in Fox Film v. Doyal, the court said,
The sole interest of the United States and the primary object in conferring the [copyright] monopoly lie in the general benefits derived by the public from the labors of authors.
This fundamental decision explains why copyright is not required by the Constitution, only permitted as an option -- and why it is supposed to last for "limited times." If copyright were a natural right, something that authors have because they deserve it, nothing could justify terminating this right after a certain period of time, any more than everyone's house should become public property after a certain lapse of time from its construction.
The "copyright bargain"
The copyright system works by providing privileges and thus benefits to publishers and authors; but it does not do this for their sake. Rather, it does this to modify their behavior: to provide an incentive for authors to write more and publish more. In effect, the government spends the public's natural rights, on the public's behalf, as part of a deal to bring the public more published works. Legal scholars call this concept the "copyright bargain." It is like a government purchase of a highway or an airplane using taxpayer's money, except that the government spends our freedom instead of our money.
But is the bargain as it exists actually a good deal for the public? Many alternative bargains are possible; which one is best? Every issue of copyright policy is part of this question. If we misunderstand the nature of the question, we will tend to decide the issues badly.
The Constitution authorizes granting copyright powers to authors. In practice, authors typically cede them to publishers; it is usually the publishers, not the authors, who exercise these powers and get most of the benefits, though authors may get a small portion. Thus it is usually the publishers that lobby to increase copyright powers. To better reflect the reality of copyright rather than the myth, this article refers to publishers rather than authors as the holders of copyright powers. It also refers to the users of copyrighted works as "readers," even though using them does not always mean reading, because "the users" is remote and abstract.
The first error: "striking a balance"
The copyright bargain places the public first: benefit for the reading public is an end in itself; benefits (if any) for publishers are just a means toward that end. Readers' interests and publishers' interests are qualitati
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!)
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
For the moment, let's assume you're a brilliant writer who's just released the best selling book ever written. Because you've got copyright on it until 70 years after you die, you're set for life... hell, your kids will never have to work a day. I hardly see that as encouraging you to create more works, and if you're that good, maybe society would benefit from more than a one-shot.
This sig intentionally left justified.
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."
we should note that the Swathmore students could have easily gotten around the copyright issue by paraphrasing and writing their own original work drawn from the emails.
Without directly quoting the unpublished original sources, how could the students make their argument look like something other than a hoax? I sense an opportunity to use the "news reporting" fair use argument.
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.
So if copyright were, say, only 20 years from publication, is the author hurt? The author's not the best in the world. He's no King or Rowling. If it's not great, there's a good chance it will be forgotten in 20 years, or at least not bringing in the income the author got when it was first released.
This sig intentionally left justified.
Society should give some motivation, but not by giving no rewards.
The original U.S. copyright act gave plenty of rewards: twenty-eight whole years. The current U.S. patent act gives plenty of rewards: twenty whole years. If you feel that such a term of monopoly does not adequately reward the investment of time and effort into a work or invention, then please explain why I haven't seen Lilly, GSK, Pfizer, and the like publicly lobbying for some sort of Cher Patent Term Extension Act.
"The recording industry is a $12 billion a year business, compared with the telephone business, which is a more than $250 billion a year business. That is what economists call a 'revealed willingness to pay,' a clear preference for a technology that allows you to participate in work, socializing and interaction in general, over a technology that allows you to be a passive consumer of a packaged good."
This comparison fails to be useful in any real sense when considered for even an instant. The infrastructure, engineering and complexity of the telecommunication industry probably would scale its market value, when compared to music, much more than roughly 20 / 1 factor Benkler notes here. In fact, the only force surpressing greater telecom revenue is that consumers absolutely abhor seemingly arbitrary and maddeningly discreet fees associated with their monthly tele/cell phone bills!
To think that the billing lessons from the telecom industry offer a positive model for entertainment is not only ludacris, it's insulting to consumers who increasingly feel pestered by a fee system which forces them to nickel and dime every conversation down to minutes used -- and the excitement of VOIP proves that we are ALL hungry for an way to trash our telecom fee tally sheets.
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 appreciate the ideas the article is trying to raise in the public consciousness and I am grateful the NYT is helping to put these issues on the political map. Apparently Boynton agrees with RMS that it's important to "spread understanding of the value of freedom" although Boynton wasn't writing with regard to free software. I hope that in the next articles we can get more into specifics about how these ideas were formed because I think people have an easier time grasping useful abstractions when they are grounded in real-world events.
Giving credit where credit is due is intellectually honest. This article and Mark Webbink's recently praised article both chime in on copyleft or ideas built on copyleft without giving any credit to the person or the organization that brought it to our attention--Richard Stallman and the FSF.
Webbink goes so far as to reinvent copyleft without calling it such, thus confirming how valuable the concept is and what the open source movement is missing out on by rejecting software freedom in favor of practical concerns centered on their chief audience--businesses. The NYT article tells us "Copy Left[sic]" (spelled with a space probably to pigeon-hole the concept on the left side of the left-right false political dichotomy) is a borrowed term:
But that would come closer to describing free software. Copyleft is a way to secure the freedoms of free software for a program and its derivative works.
Digital Citizen
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.
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.
Yes. It is called "healthy lifestyle". Eating right prevents many health problems and can cure others. But people don't want that. They want to eat junk and then fix the problems later with a magic potion.
Additionally no drug company who spent millions on research is going to want to come out and say "you could pay us thousands for our patented drug but eating oranges would work just as well."
I agree with you. We need more research done with an eye toward bettering mankind over forcing mankind to fork over the bucks.
Coding Blog
Is this suppose to be a rhetorical argument that a creator doesn't own what he creates?
I intended it as an argument that an author shouldn't own what other authors create.
the innovation is not identical to the source, I have added my own novel element.
True, you can get away with copying ideas. But what about classes of works where the "idea" and the "expression" aren't so easy to distinguish, such as musical works? Under U.S. law, if you add your novel element to a substantial portion of an existing copyrighted expression without permission of the other work's author, which is not obtainable in the vast majority of cases, the other work's author owns your novel element, even if your novel element predominates over the other author's.
The novel element is my property, for a limited time at least, and rightly so.
In terms of an author's own lifetime, how is until your children are long dead a "limited time", other than through the twisted interpretation offered by the Supreme Court in Eldred v. Ashcroft? Inventors, on the other hand, seem happy with 20 years; I don't recall any news report of them trying for some sort of Cher Patent Term Extension Act.
To say that society owns what a creator's brain creates is to say that society owns the creator's brain. It doesn't.
But to say that one author owns what another author creates is to say that one author owns the other author's brain. He does.
I agree with the position on derivative works and copyright term that Spider Robinson puts forth in the short story "Melancholy Elephants". Have you read it?
I'm not advocating more taxes, but I'm thinking of property tax.
... too low, and the shareholders will revolt, too high, and it gets taxed too much.
The taxes that you're talking about aren't related to ownership, they're translated to sales or profit/loss.
For instance, most people pay property taxes on a house or land they own.
Some states have car taxes. Others have luxury taxes.
If people really thought there was such a thing as "Intellectual Property", then it would have occured to somebody to tax it.
In fact, I can make a pitch that this tax would benefit society at large. Think of it:
1) IP that is generating revenue would have to be fairly valued
2) For IP that is not really worth anything (some old movie that isn't even available), the owner would have to either pay taxes on it, or release it to the public domain.
3) IP owners wouldn't be content to "sit" on something.
Like I said, I'm not advocating taxes, but if we're going to call a copyright, "Intellectual Property", I'm saying we should go all the way and really treat it like property. Taxes and all.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
But.. we don't want there to be NO copyright laws. That's far too blanket a solution, and it hoses artists completely.
What would be good is this:
a) Copyright ends at death of author (not copyright holder), that's it. "But what about the kids?" They already got the advantage - genes with creative talent, and possibly a famous pedigree. We want to make sure that they use them.
b) Every copyright is doubled. There is an author's copyright and a market copyright. The author of a work starts with both. The market copyright can be freely sold, transferred, etc. The author's copyright CANNOT be transferred from the author BY ANY MEANS. Thus, authors can still sell copyright rights if they want to, but cannot be forced to give up rights on their own work - they always have author's copyright.
c) Legislate the creation of legal deprotection agencies. These agencies will remove copy protection measures from works once they have confirmed that they are not being used for illegal purposes. (This is not illegal under the DMCA! The DMCA makes it impossible by banning the distribution of the tools and information that would be needed to do so, but doesn't make it illegal.)
d) Ban advertising and nationalise retail. Again super harsh. But, sadly, it is now the *ONLY* way to prevent the commercial market becoming inevitably dominated by the existing big distributors.
Copyright doesn't prevent anyone from building on many sources, just from basically taking something and trying to say it's yours.
:-)
It's a relative thing, sure, and I'm not trying to argue that copyright isn't a little too much in favour of the copyright holders, but if there was no protection, there would be no reason for at least 90% of the information being published to be published.
As much as we want to have a free society, you still expect to be paid for the hours you work, right? Well, you have to follow the money. Money has to flow *somewhere*, or the economy stops.
There, was that a fine leap from copyright law to the entire economy?
A cheerful little bird is sitting here singing.
You are correct. However I have a problem with the *obscene* profits of the pharmaceutical companies.
Yes, as they say in their press releases they spend 100s of millions on their research budgets for drugs that don't pay off, but what their press releases don't say is that they spend MORE that their research budgets on marketing and lobbying. They also don't mention that the sum of the yearly compensation packages of the top ten executives of any pharmaceutical company is usually *at least* 10% of the company's total research budget.
There needs to be a middle ground between no profits and obscene profits that provides the maximum benefit for the society at large.