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.

Comments

CopyLEFT says...

[Hawkxor]

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.

copy left

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

This should be a new definition of irony...

[RobertFisher]

This should be a new definition of irony...

"Dear NYT editors: 'Copy Left' really shouldn't have a space in it. Thanks."

/. editors telling the editors of the NYT how to do their job...

"the Copy Left"

[Corgha]

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.

Re:"the Copy Left"

[Frater 219]

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.

Indeed, there's a right-anarchist argument that, unlike private property, copyright is nothing but a government-created monopoly. (Of course, there's also a left-anarchist argument that private property is a government-created monopoly too, but I'm not so sure -- territory is a pretty fundamental idea for a lot of species that don't have governments or copyright.)

I don't think the argument extends, though, to one of the other disparate bits of law that's lumped into the nonsense rubric of "intellectual property" -- trademark. A trademark, like a person's signature, isn't property so much as it is a kind of statement about the trademarked goods: "This luncheon meat was made by the Hormel company," "This document was signed by John Hancock." Falsely applying someone else's trademark to the goods you sell is like forging their signature on an IOU: it's not a property violation against the person whose sigil you forge, but rather a fraud against your customer, or whomever you're passing the IOU to.

(Yes, "right-anarchist" is another word for the American use of "libertarian", and "left-anarchist" for the European "libertarian socialist" or the American "anarchist".)

Re:"the Copy Left"

[TKinias]

scripsit Frater 219:

Indeed, there's a right-anarchist argument that, unlike private property, copyright is nothing but a government-created monopoly. (Of course, there's also a left-anarchist argument that private property is a government-created monopoly too, but I'm not so sure -- territory is a pretty fundamental idea for a lot of species that don't have governments or copyright.)

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.

Good to see this in the mainstream press

[jimicus]

The article encapsulates many of the major issues affecting free software today. Best of all, it's written in a reasonably sensible, intelligent fashion (rather than "these copyleft commies are going to take over the world!" which SCO would like us to believe).

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?"

Re:Good to see this in the mainstream press

[Apreche]

This reminds me of computer crime class a couple weeks ago. We were discussing different communities, and one of them was the open source community. One significantly older graduate student said this.

"Why would you give away your work for free?"

She was completely dumbfounded. The problem is that the older generations still have the protestant work ethic. In our generation the protestant work ethic has died. People are willing to actually do some amount of work for the greater good of society. After we meet our needs by doing "real" work, we are willing to do things that are both productive and fun for the good of others. This has not happened often in history because usually leisure activities are not productive. The rise of geekdom has created the furst truly productive leisure activity, writing software. And since it doesn't cost anything to make, we give it away for free with little or no copyright. This new way of thinking completely dumbfounds anyone who is used to it the other way.

Re:Good to see this in the mainstream press

[be-fan]

That's hardly the case. There is a great tradition of people doing things for the benefit of mankind in their freetime. John Locke, for example, didn't really have an occupation as such --- he was a student of the church, but never became a cleric, he studied (and practiced, for awhile) medicine, but never got a medical degree, etc. His main profession seemed to have been being a friend of Lord Shaftesbury, which gave him an influential position and little real work to occupy him, save his writing.

Re:Good to see this in the mainstream press

[abe ferlman]

More examples:

Ben Franklin refused a patent on the Franklin Stove, saying it was his civic responsibility to share.

Salk, when asked if he intended to patent the polio vaccine, said that would be "like patenting the sun."

Greed may drive innovation in some cases, but only when there are strong limitations on the duration of the patent/copyright. When you let the rules be set by the greedy like Disney and Microsoft, we get nothing but permanent proprietary lock-ins.

Re:Good to see this in the mainstream press

[cfulmer]

Pfft. There have always been people, including protestants, willing to do things for the greater good of society. The Salvation Army (mainly protestant), for example, has been around since Civil War times.

Even the production of intellectual property -- the idea of freely sharing ideas -- has been around for a long time. For example, 'Fine Woodworking' magazine, about as far away from software as you can get, has a space where readers write in a blurb about the clever ways that they've used to solve problems. There is some marginal compensation for the 'best' one in each issue, but people share their ideas -- their IP -- with others because there's a sense of community.

Productive leisure activity has been around for as long as knitting, sewing, painting and whittling.

In reality, part of the reason that many people give away the product of their work is because there is no reasonable way for them to make money off of it: Not only is there no inexpensive mechanism to charge, but there isn't even a good way to figure out how much to charge.

There are also non-monetary forms of payback. Law Reviews, for example, generally don't pay anything to the writers of their articles. But, the writers get prestiege in a specific community. People who contribute to free (as in speech) software also receive similar benefits.

Occasionally pragmatic business reasons for doing so exist, especially in the world of communications standards. For example, the IETF relies on 'loose consensus and running code' in the promulgation of internet standards. If you're a corporation trying to push a standard, you can help yourself by publishing a free version.

There are probably people producing software just out of the goodness of their hearts, with no desire for any other benefit to themselves. But, I don't think you can characterize the entire free software movement as being like that.

Even James Boyle, one of the 'Copy Left' people in the book, has said that he likes earning royalties from the publication of his works. (I happened to take a class from him in the fall.)

Re:no copyrights... no NYT registration

[the eric conspiracy]

If there were no copyrights, you can bet the NYT would not be putting content on the Internat unless it was protected with DRM.

Public Apathy

[hjmartin70]

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?

Re:no copyrights... no NYT registration

[ShadeARG]

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.

Good choice of words

[Space cowboy]

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

Re:no copyrights... no NYT registration

[cxvx]

... I would not have to register to NYT to read the article ...

You don't have to register with the NYT.
With the following procedure, you can read any NYT article:

• copy link to the article
• go to google.com
• feed the link to google
• You'll get a "Sorry, no information is available for the URL ..." message
• Click on the "If the URL is valid, try visiting that web ..." link
• Voila, you can now read the article, register free, thanks to google

I suspect this works because the NYT sees google as the referrer.

In a vacuum?

[tepples]

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?

Re:no copyrights... no NYT registration

[MORTAR_COMBAT!]

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.

Re:corrections

[Jameth]

Were not NYT writers and editors the imbeciles responsible for irreparably damaging the English language by convincing millions of people that a comma was not needed before the and in a series?

Seeing as Slashdot has kepts its errors rather internal, rather than damaging most of humanity, I'd say they can comment just fine.

Derivative works

[tepples]

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?

Confusion

[t_allardyce]

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!)

Re:Tyranny?

[cei]

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.

Re:What ?!!

[Arathrael]

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."

Re:no copyrights... no NYT registration

[Stephen Samuel]

If there were no copyrights, you can bet the NYT would not be putting content on the Internat unless it was protected with DRM.

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:

Thomas Jefferson, for one, considered copyright a necessary evil: he favored providing just enough incentive to create, nothing more, and thereafter allowing ideas to flow freely as nature intended.
''If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property,'' he wrote, ''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.''
His conception of copyright was enshrined in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, .....

Those who forget history are doomed to...something

[jbn-o]

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:

([...] originally used by software programmers to signal that their product bore fewer than the usual amount of copyright restrictions).

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.

Canada

[Dashing Leech]

From the article: "Only second-world countries, like Croatia or Brazil, he speculates, are unfettered enough to try something new." (refering to William Fisher's business model in which music is paid for by levy's on recordable media like CD-Rs).

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.

Re:no copyrights... no NYT registration

[Grax]

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.

Re:A serious question

[tkrotchko]

I'm not advocating more taxes, but I'm thinking of property tax.

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 ... too low, and the shareholders will revolt, too high, and it gets taxed too much.

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.

Re:no copyrights... no NYT registration

[instarx]

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.