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Kahle vs Ashcroft: Copyright Battle Continues
Robotech_Master writes "People may remember librarian Brewster Kahle as the man behind Archive.org's Wayback Machine and the Internet Bookmobile. He was one of the big supporters of Eldred in the Eldred vs Ashcroft case. Well, he's at it again. A new lawsuit, Kahle vs Ashcroft, has been filed as of March 22nd. Lawrence Lessig comments on this case in his blog." Question number 3 of the FAQ explains that while the Eldred case challenged the length of copyright expansion, this case challenges the breadth.
Not that I agree with the result, but didn't the US Supreme Court rule that effectively "open-ended" copyright terms were OK?
I'd like to say that the parent post is *EXTREMELY* important and must be addressed.
Most open-source developers take their copyright for granted. One says that his/her code is GPL (or BSD or whatever) and *poof*, like magic, it is.
I don't know what is involved in registering for a copyright, but I'm sure it's harder than doing nothing.
These fears may be misplaced, but I'd like someone to address them.
In summary, the plaintiff is annoyed that he has to track down authors to get permission to publish their books online. So he wants the law to change back so that authors need to be burdened with paperwork and fees to obtain copyright because he doesn't want to spend the time and money getting permission from the authors. Standard practice of trying to use the govt. to make your life easier at the expense of someone elses constitutional rights.
Vote for Pedro
"But many books fall into a nether region. These are works that are not commercially viable and therefore not widely available to the public, but are nevertheless subject to continuing copyright protection."
In the event that they cannot convince Ashcroft, they could also start another project which would automate and simplify the process of obtaining this permission.
If anything, making it easier to access this type of information would be beneficial for both the authors and those in search of using their work.
This suit seeks to have the laws that implement the Berne Convention struck down as unconstitutional. However, my highly inexpert reading of the Constitution reveals that the Constitution and all treaties entered into by the US are the supreme law of the land. The Berne Convention is just such an international treaty. Thus, it would seem that the supremacy clause trumps any argument Lessig et al may bring before the court, since the terms of the Berne Convention enjoy equal footing with the Constitution.
Now, if the US enters into a treaty that is in direct opposition to the Constitution, which document wins? I have no idea if this issue in Constitutional law has ever been addressed.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"
Notice how no execeptions are made for abandonware, shareware, vaporware, freeware or any other type. So now the question to ask seems to be what constitutes limited? My limited copyright time doesnt seem to equal Mickey Mouse's.
Jason
Argue About Stuff
Yeah, I'm not sure I get his arguments here. The idea that authors' works are "locked up" against their will seems ludicrous at the face of it.
.... (drum roll please) ... finish this cup of coffee and read the paper.
I've created works that I have specifically registered with the copyright office. An example is the comic strip, below. I registered this work to protect myself from people reprinting the strip against my will for financial gain. For instance, I don't want to be browsing through a book in a bookstore and come across my strip printed there, and I want to have the full benefit of the tools of financial restitution available to me should that occur.
If, on the other hand, you, Joe Blow, wanted to use the very same strip for your own purposes and you weren't planning to really make money off it and your use really wouldn't do any damage to my ability to "profit" off the strip, in my opinion, then I might just allow you to use it. In fact, even if you never contacted me for permission to use it (but I'd prefer you did), there'd be nothing stopping you. All I'd have to do to "unlock" that terribly "locked up," copyrighted work is
Follow me? One common misconception about copyrights is that they "go away" if you don't defend them. That can be true of trademarks, but not of copyrights. If it's my personal policy to sue Disney when they infringe my copyright, but not sue individuals like you, then that's my business and nobody else's.
On the other hand, he seems to be saying that we should go back to mandatory registration, because at least then works that nobody remembers to register will be public domain. Well, where's the fairness in that?
Who do you think is more likely to register everything they produce: Disney, with its army of lawyers? Or me?
So the end result of mandatory registration is that companies like Disney continue to amass their ivory towers of intellectual property, while people like you and me lose out. That is, Disney would be able to make use of our works with impunity, because nobody took the time to educate us to be diligent about registering our works if we believe in the protections of copyright.
P.S. And I shouldn't need to remind you that most of us here do believe in the protections of copyright. Copyright law is the very backbone of licensing structures like the GPL.
Breakfast served all day!
Going back to the old "no copyright until you register" system is something else, and pretty radical.
It also makes copyright an almost acceptable premise. To expect every idea to be "born copyrighted" is just a little too much. How greedy and lazy can one get? They want all this protection and don't want to put up ANY effort to apply for it. Talk about wanting a free lunch... If you want to have it and keep it, you should have to go out and get it and maintain it.
What?
Ashcroft is a nutcase. He spent $8000 of taxpayers money cover up the bare breasts on the lady of justice statue in Washington DC. Because, as Al Franken says "he didn't want to be photographed next to another boob."
If he were a member of the Islam religion and had had similar objections to nakedness, would you take fault with him then?
He also has daily prayer sessions with his staff. Regardless of their faith.
Does he require that his staff attend and participate?
So he should be forbidden from praying? By extension, should all civil servants renounce their religion in order to do their job?
Again, would you object to this if he was a muslim? Or would you just sit silent?
There are also stories of him asking judges to annoint him with oil when he got into a new position... weird stuff. He's just an all around nut.
Have anything to back that up? A link to an eye-witness account of this? Or just more rumors?
Seems to me you (and many others here) are in the business of Ashcroft FUD.
The history of the Supreme Court shows very little traction for the reframing of constitutional questions and going back up. Even though they make a big deal about how this isn't Eldred vs. Ashcroft, it really is a distinction the court will find tenuous. They got shot down on the copyright extensions, they will get shot down on the inclusionary aspects of this.
I believe they are right and the court is wrong on Eldred, but until a Democratic president can get in for another 8 years and Kennedy and Scalia get the boot, they won't win.
The abandonware issue is more substantial. A requirement that copyright be renewed for $1, or that it be deemed abandoned if nobody is available to offer the rights after a reasonable period of time, is more rational. Perhaps one of those evil "activist judges" will so find.
sulli
RTFJ.
The issue seems to be primarily dealing with "orphan works", by which the article refers to works that were initially marked with a copyright notice but whose owners cannot now be determined. Obviously if the work contains a means of contacting the owner, it should be fairly simple to determine whether that owner minds if the work is used. It is when the owner cannot be contacted that long unrequested copyright terms become a problem.
In the case of your comic, twenty years from now you probably won't care much if someone wants to archive it for a non-profit use. In the intervening time though, any contact information that the comic contains on it may no longer be valid. Can you then see the possible benefit of having a central repository of contact information for copyright holders? If it is the responsibility of the user to obtain permission from a copyright holder, shouldn't it at least be possible to contact that person?
Atanamis
However, in the modern copyright system, you do not need to register and you do not need to place a copyright notice. As everyone knows by now, you can't just take material and use it as your own. Ever. Anywhere. You must presume it is copyrighted until you find out otherwise and material IS copyrighted by its creator, period - without registration and without placing a notice on the material. Just because I don't say "Copyright 1999" on my short story doesn't mean you can steal it and use it to your whim.
According to the constution. The reason why we have copyright is Article 1, Section 8, Paragraph 8 of the constution. It says that congress shall have the power "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries". To that end we got copyrights and patents.
Notice, however, that it is quite clear about the reasoning. It is to promote progress, in other words, to make sure the work is distributed. Also notice it is clear about the limited times, in that the author can only have control for a while, then it belogns to everyone.
So it's clear that it is unconstutional to use copright to try and maintain control forever and not share with anyone.
The whole problem is that they cannot locate authors in order to get permission. The only way they could solve this is by.... having everyone register their work with Kahle & Co. But wait! thats exactly what the government used to do!! You see the conundrum?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
"If he were a member of the Islam religion and had had similar objections to nakedness, would you take fault with him then?"
I would take fault with anyone who looks at a statue of justice and sees nakedness.
"So he should be forbidden from praying?"
On the job? Absolutely, unless he's doing it during his lunch break and in private.
"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity." - Marshall McLuhan
I can just see the legal tangle such a change would cause for Linux, et al. I also question how well such a change would work with the Berne Convention, since we're not talking about a novel here, written in one country, but a product written by hundreds of contributors from around the planet, both US and elsewhere. IANAL, but this looks like it would be a real mess, with no one winning but the lawyers.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
$8000 to cover the lady of justice statue?
Wouldn't it have been cheaper to just use a burka?
And if I don't want to join his prayer group? Do you really believe there would be no repercussions? I tend to believe you would go no further in his administration. It would be hard if not impossible to prove but I bet you would sit and watch the promotions pass you by.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
You make it sound so banal.
The thing is, tracking down the authors (or, rather, their rights-holders) can be an impossible task for just one work. And what if all of the survivors of the author don't know which one of them has the rights? Or even if any of them have the rights?
What if even the records of who owns the rights have been lost? It's almost a self-referential problem...in the era before computers, not only works but the legal documents about the works were stored as paper. And paper can get misplaced, or eaten by insects, or destroyed in fires, floods, etc. What happens to a work that there is no way even to find out who owns it anymore?
Multiply that by the tens or hundreds of thousands of works out there that are lying fallow, and you begin to see that it's not just "a lot of work." It's an immense, totally impossible amount of work. It's akin to the Augean Stables of Greek myth.
Thus, just as Hercules creatively rerouted a river through those stables to clean them out, Kahle and the co-plaintiffs are hoping to make the problem of finding the rights-holders for abandoned works irrelevant.
They're not even talking about stuff that people are still publishing and making money off of. If they're doing that, then they know who the rights holders are, and the rights holders care enough about the stuff to keep it available. They're talking about the stuff that's lying fallow and not benefiting anybody.
To me, this seems like a pretty good compromise between the Mickey Mouse contingent and the Information Wants to Be Free contingent, if it goes through. Let Disney keep Mickey...let people who care about their works keep them. But let us have the stuff that nobody else wants anymore.
I'm sure that there will be some sort of well-reasoned and fair mechanism for determining what's been abandoned and what hasn't. I don't think it'll be arbitrary. I do think that it will do us a world of good to make sure this information does not get lost.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
You seem to have a few misconceptions.
"If they want to use my work, then I can grant them the rights to use it."
Only if they can find out that you are the copyright holder and if they can also find out how to contact you.
The problem that this is trying to address is the thousands of works that currently cannot legally be archived or utilized due to the near-prohibitive cost of trying to research who (if anyone) is the proper person to contact.
"If I am required to register my copyright, then I lose some of the ability to protect it."
I don't see how this sentence makes any sense at all. If you are required to register your copyright, or to include some useful copyright notice with the original, it merely gives would be (re)users a standard way to determine that you are the copyright holder they need to talk to. You don't lose anything...
Going back to the old "no copyright until you register" system is something else, and pretty radical.
With copyright, you get a government-guaranteed monopoly, backed and enforced by police and courts, paid for by tax payers, lasting decades. It seems entirely reasonable to ask you to at least affirmatively assert your copyright.
(Note that GPL stuff very definitely uses copyright as its base. Do you want to have to register every little release to have a valid GPL on it?)
Yes, of course--why wouldn't I? This could be handled completely automatically, with a nominal, tiny fee. Furthermore, it doesn't have to be every tiny release; even with registration requirements, you get a significant period of time to register. So, GPL'ed software could be registered once per year.
I don't see how unconditional copyright creates a violation of free speech.
/. quite likely ;-) that someone else has "published" the same words previously, and they are the copyright holder.
...
Well, under the current rules, this text is copyrighted as soon as I hit the Submit button. However, I don't know whether I am the copyright holder. It's possible (and on
So I may be the copyright holder, or I may be a criminal engaged in copyright iinfringement. How can I know which I am? Right - I can't. There is no way that I can possibly know whether someone already owns the copyright to these words. This is because they don't have to register their copyright, and they don't have to publish there words any place that I can find them.
So I have two choices: I can take the risk of infringing someone else's copyright. Or I can keep quiet and not worry.
This seems as clear a violation of free speech as you could possibly have. Any words that I "publish" entail a serious threat of civil and/or criminal charges for copyright infringement, and my only way to avoid this is to say nothing.
Let's see; should I hit the Submit button and take the risk? Ah, why the hell not?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.