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Lessig Legal Team Needs Your Copyright Stories
Joe Gratz writes "Lawrence Lessig and his legal team are asking for your help. Kahle v. Ashcroft is a lawsuit that challenges changes to U.S. copyright law that have created a large class of 'orphan works' -- creative works which are out of print and no longer commercially available, but which are still regulated by copyright. To win the lawsuit, we need more examples of people being burdened by these copyright-related barriers to the use of orphan works. Visit the Kahle Submission Site and tell us your story."
as being "burdened"? There were a lot of fun games way back in the day that are now abandonware, but since they are copyrighted you really can't do much about them. Either you can't find them anymore, or if you can find them(and pay an arm and a leg for them on eBay) you usually have to keep old hardware laying around to play them.
The U2 single by Negativland! I am burdened by its lack of availability!
Seriously, they are probably looking for a work which over which there has never been a legal firestorm, and which can easily be demonstrated to have a demonstrable value (or the lack can have a demonstrable negative value). Censored music and software abandonware need not apply--sorry Slashdotters!
Sometimes a company may cease distributing a product because they want to focus consumer attention on their new offerings.
However, I definately support returning the ownership of IP to the employees that authored it...assuming their employer went out of business.
On a more speculative note, it'd be interesting to see a system where patents and copyrights had to be in the name of individuals, and ownership of that material followed the individual wherever he went.
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I do this for a living, photography printing and scanning. I have a very hard time telling people that I can't copy a picture because it isn't 75 years old yet. This stands true for any picture taken by a company that is still in business regardless of whether they are even able to make reprints anymore! Now with the digital age the copyright has been quoted to me as 100 years from the date of creation.
As a computer, I am amused by the faith you have in technology.
Hmmm - There are a good many "niche publications" out there that it is no longer possible to find the author for... Less so in mainsteam works however.
Lots of specialized technical documents are in this category. However, people generally don't challenge the copyright of something obscure like that.
I ask the question what is this group looking for? What motivates this case? SInce it is a legal group, they are motivated by money, so I would want to know more about why they are truly doiong this before I would support this effort.
Can anyone "follow the money" and find why this is being done?
www.effectiveelectrons.com "chips that work" Analog, RF, Mixed Signal
No need to find original Scorched Earth source code, because there's xscorch, the free software clone.
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
'Censored music and software abandonware need not apply',
Why not,
I've had a number of CD/vinal stolen in my time and have had to resort to possibly ileagal distribution methods to be able to listen to them,
since:
a) I don't know where my copy is.
b) I can't get a copy from anyone because they won't do a run of one out of print piece of vinal.
This to me has been no great loss, but I'm sure there are people who have lost more valuable copyright materials due to fire or thieft.
The only time I have ever wanted to get a copy of an Old book I was able to, because it was more that 75 years old. I'n this case I, and the distribution company benifited because the book was out of copyright.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Everybody seems to be focused on video games and music around here, but let's not forget one of the biggest areas where copyright becomes a serious problem with orphaned works -- television and movies. I bet each person in here could name at least 5-10 movies and 5-10 television shows that's they would love to be able to see again, but can't because the companies that own the copyrights to those works refuse to release them on video/dvd or air them again. So why is it illegal to buy or sell fan made copies of such works if there is no other means to acquire or view them?
:)
Obviously most of these things aren't in print because a lack of substantial demand for them, but lets consider that some of the films that are acclaimed for their worth in terms of art are also those that are the least popular among the consumer masses. Wouldn't it be fantastic if none of us could legally view "Casablanca" anymore because Viacom decided it doesn't sell well enough, but still held onto the copyright so nobody could watch it again?
I would name some movies and shows I'd love to see released again, but I'm sure I'd get laughed at. I have some pretty low-brow tastes
"The Wright brothers were the first to fly with a heavier-than-air machine, but boy did they have a lousy plane"
At one time he was the most read mistery author in the world. Today, of nearly a hundred books he wrote, no more than five or so are in print, and all from the "Perry Mason" series. No "DA" books from Gardner anywhere.
No one got rich, yet it enabled the private sector to fund preservation through the resale of videos of long out of print materials. The output of famous movies stars like Clara Bow (the "It" girl) and Colleen Moore is becoming almost completely unavailable to the average person unable to arrange a private screening with the an archive.
It is no accident the the copyright law was pushed through to make 1923 the cut-off year. After 1924 movies became more "modern" in quality of camera and film, and adaptation of the standard speed of 24 frames per second. Also after 1924 phonograph recordings began to use the new electronic recording techniques which allowed for higher fidelity and sound quality compared to the old acoustic recordings.
The saddest part about the films is that the owners of the copyrights have no interest in preserving them. These movies are literally dissolving into dust as the nitrate based film stock decomposes. Copyright extension has been a complete disaster with respect the preservation of film and early sound recordings.
I've taken many philosophy classes where the prof. has had to hand out inch thick stacks of photocopies because the work is out of print. If someone really wanted to, they could get them in trouble for this. Along the same lines, the Kemp-Smith translation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason was out of print the last time I checked. It is THE definitive translation which is refered to in all the literature. One pretty much can't study Kant without it.
What's more, even a $1 fee -- or a no-fee registration process -- can be unduly burdensome: imagine creating, for instance, a Half-Life 2 FAQ for the web and posting it up on Usenet. Under their proposed system as I read it, unless you go to the trouble of filling out the copyright registration for your FAQ there would be nothing to prevent a company like Brady Games from coming along and publishing your FAQ unattributed in their Official Half-Life 2 Guide(tm). For large works like a FAQ it may be reasonable to perform registration, but do you really want to have to go to the trouble to make sure that every Usenet and Slashdot post you make won't be reprinted for profit by someone else?
It's worth remembering that "copyright" refers not just to consumers' rights but also to creators' -- the right to say who can copy your original material and for what purposes. These are your rights too.
No, because if you are a "hermit author", it is unlikely your work has been published. This is about works that have been published but are no longer commercially (or otherwise) available. That needs to change. I've seen books and recordings only a decade or two old go for outrageous prices on ebay. The owners of the copyright on these works, usually large media companies, try to claim there is no market for these items, but when someone is willing to pay $100+ for something that retailed for $20, that sure as hell sounds like a market to me. (An example of this is a book of transcriptions of some of Frank Zappa's guitar music transcribed by Steve Vai. I've seen this book on ebay often and it almost always reaches $100 or so.)
Disney outright uses it as a marketing ploy:
"Buy X now! Available for the last time ever on video!"
They deliberately orphan older movies to force consumers [who may not want to buy them just yet but equally don't want to never be able to buy them] to purchase them in a given format.
Mind you, using Disney as an example might not be the best move as they can (and do) buy better/more politicians.
psychologist friend of mine recently pointed out that treating a corporation as a 'person' might open them to other possibilities ... in fact he pointed out that if you look at the behaviour of modern corporations and analyze them using the normal psychological diagnostic criteria (DMS-III) the diagnosis 'psychopath' often comes out ....
The Constitution states that the purpose of patents and copyrights is "to promote the progress of science and useful arts". Well, I can understand that books do serve this purpose. But how exactly does binary executable software promote this progress? If the source code remains a trade secret, it will be lost forever after the company no longer exists. And copy-protected works? They will disappear if the devices needed to play them are no longer available. So, the logical thing, would be to declare inconstitutional any sort of DRM on copyrighted works. Trade secrets need no copyright protection, they have their own protection in the secret. Copyrights, like patents, are an incentive for people to reveal how their creation works, not a license to get profits from secrets.
I was wondering if the old credit card processing software my startup company wrote, most recently owned by Red Hat, was still available for download to users who already had license keys. No new license keys will ever be available, but for users who already had them, it's conceivable that they'd need to redownload the software if their credit card processing server crashed, or if they migrated operating systems (for example from SCO, which we did support, to Linux).
So, I wandered over to Red Hat's anonymous FTP server, and there it was -- a piece of closed-source software that the company hasn't supported since 2001 is still available for download at the same location it was at when it was a supported product.
Kudos to Red Hat for this. There's an extremely slim chance that some ex-customer could have been screwed if this closed-source copyrighted software had been removed from their download servers, but it hasn't been. It's still there. I applaud them.
(And it's not Red Hat's fault it was closed source. The NDAs that the banks and credit card companies required pretty much gave no other options to anybody who tried to do this sort of thing in a legit manner. There were pseudo-open-source efforts to do similar stuff, but none of them had the approval of the banks, and as far as I know they actually violated the terms the banks set for using their merchant accounts.)
(By the way, if anyone at Red Hat sees this message -- I'd love to re-obtain the rights to that old source code. To some extent I'm screwed by the copyright on the thing's source code. I've signed the NDAs, but I can't get my own source code back, even though I'd like to continue fixing bugs and updating clearing house compliance for free. But the customers were not screwed, and in the end that's much more important.)
Maybe this is what Copyright law and the DMCA is really about. Namely, the destruction of the culture of our ancestors so that it can be replaced with the anaesthetizing culture that suits the current political establishment, such as, the current crop of movies being pumped out of Hollywood, poisoning the minds of an entire generation.
The other thing to note is that any changes to copyright law are NOT going to be applied retroactively.
I find that odd, as they certainly passed the extensions retroactively. I always thought that the way to go about fixing (parts of) the copyright problem was to attack the 1976 and Bono laws as ex post facto laws, which are expressly forbidden by the Constitution.
Not making it available when there is a demand is unacceptable, especially given the ease of making works available in digital format now.
AC comments get piped to
Doesn't the owner of a piece of intellectual property have the right to make their property unavailable if they so choose? I realize that most of the examples that have been posted here involve situations where giving widespread access to the 'orphaned' IP wouldn't really hurt anyone, but there are also plenty of cases where a company or individual might want to deliberately make a piece of IP unavailable. If I were a publisher who had recently replaced "The Complete Geek's Guide to Posting on Slashdot" with "The New and Revised Complete Geek's Guide to Posting on Slashdot," I would probably take the original version out of print and wouldn't want it released into the public domain as free competition for my newer product.
Or what if I just decide that I don't want my book/photo/software/whatever circulating any more? Maybe I had a religious conversion and decided that my IP is no longer fit for use in any decent society, so now I want to bury it. If it's my property, don't I have the right to lock it away?
MST3k
So who owns it now?
Why not change the law such, to make that practice legal?
That would give copyright owners all the usual benefits, but only for as long as they keep the work available (under reasonable terms).
When the copyright owner would stop making the work available, then with that they would at the same time waive their right to enforce copyright protection, or stop others from making it available.
Another case where copyright shouldn't apply. The shows were broadcast, but not distributed in an end-user form...they weren't PUBLISHED. That would be a great case to try out if you could actually find somebody with a VCR tape of an episode...even better than the posted case. That would set a wicked precedent for all of the DRM'd crap that the media is pushing...because if it is locked up so tight it can't be produced, it was broadcast...but never really published in the first place because it can't EVER be copied.
Both stories come from the directors who spoke after their respective movie was shown at the Roger Ebert Overlooked Film Festival (known better to Champaign and Urbana, Illinois locals as "Ebertfest").
* Bernard Rose, director of "Paperhouse", had to (and I'm using the term correctly here) steal the reels to this movie after it was shown at Ebertfest a couple of years ago. Sony Classics was unwilling to distribute the movie in formats for home video and Rose wanted more people to see the movie. So he took the reels after it was shown in the Virginia Theatre (a theatre in Champaign, Illinois where the Ebertfest movies are shown).
* Jonathan Caouette directed "Tarnation" which was made on his computer for what is described as "an initial cost of $187" by the Ebertfest literature. Caouette later discovered that clearing the rights for the snippets of other movies used in Tarnation would cost roughly half a million dollars.
Digital Citizen
So, this seems like a great cause to me, and I'd love to contribute, if only I knew of an orphaned work, and a good use for it. I suppose that I could go hunting for any number of orphaned works that I might find usefull, but if anyone could post a list, or searchable database of works that fit the bill, that would probably really inspire participation in this....
I was thrilled then the photographer my wife and I picked for our wedding told us that we keep the negatives. He said, "the pictures are ours, we're just paying him for the use of his camera and his eyes for that day." The fact that he takes fantastic photos made it even better. :)
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"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
Let us sign a bargain with the devil.
The devil wants to own certain works, such as the mouse, the Beatles, etc. We want to release forgotten works and future works into the public domain.
Let us offer to the corporations perpetual copyright on anything they now own. We'll give them a year to make up a grand list of it all. In exchange, we'll demand a reset of the copyright period for new works to something much shorter (like the 1976 version of 33 years + renewal for 33 years). For old works not on the grand list, we'll reset their period according to whatever copyright law existed when they were first published (causing most of them to flow into the public domain immediately).
How's that for a deal? We give up the mouse forever and they give us back a functional public domain. I'm betting that it won't take long for "the locked works" to be forgotten by all of us.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)