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Lessig - Public Domain Dead in 35 Years
tcd004 writes "Lawrence Lessig, in an article on the Foreign Policy site, predicts that the public domain will die a slow death at the hands of anti-piracy efforts. From the article: 'The danger remains invisible to most, hidden by the zeal of a war on piracy. And that is how the public domain may die a quiet death, extinguished by self-righteous extremism, long before many even recognize it is gone.'"
Nothing has fallen into the public domain for almost a half century before I was born.
It's dead Jim.
Is this really Lessig writing or is he just regurgitating Ray Bradbury?
In any event, people simply don't care. As long as they have a cool ringtone, that is.
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that the main purpose of copyright, was to enhance the public domain.
Does it mean that Disney will have to actually come up with new stories instead of ripping off Grimm brothers et al?
Windows users:
Internet Explorer is obsolete. Please upgrade to Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.
This is why everything I write on Wikipedia is still released into the public domain.
(It's never too late to join the Renaissance)
What a stupid thing to suggest.
;)
As long as people are out there sharing ideas freely, it'll survive. It may not get as much attention as it does right now (i.e. all the attention open source gets right now), but as a concept, it cannot die.
There, I had a thought and shared it. PD was just reborn
In a free society the public domain will never die. It's part of our culture. There will come a point when things get so bad that people will just stop caring about the lawyers and self-righteous extremism. Look at what a joke patents are becoming. If it's get ridiculous enough and enough people care about, it will change.
Although, things aren't so great right now, and will probably get worse before they get better.
Lessig himself teaches that, since the failing of Eldred, public domain will die due to lobbying and retroactive term extensions. That's not an anti-piracy measure, it's just big companies controlling congress.
Public domain is just on hold for a while. Hey, we only have to wait until 2019 to get our hands on that hot 1923 copyrighted material.
:(
Congress wouldn't extend copyright again, would they?
Of course, new stuff locked down by DRM won't know when it's supposed to expire, so 90+ years when it's supposed to expire, no one will know what to do with the scrambled bits.
Few people on this site dispute that the ability to automatically have your work copyrighted by default helps Sam Slashdot by making it easier to cover his stuff. However, it also means that more and more areas end up having its entire body of work covered under copyright. With the practically indefinite term of copyright being bought^W lobbied for by Disney and others, it's no wonder that Lessig talks in this kind of language...
I think the only way to save the public domain is for serious reform - be it soapbox, ballot box, or revolution - to take place sooner rather than later.
Surely the definition of PD is an application/data that the author freely distributes possibly with a small EULA asking that the app/data not be altered and re-distributed in its original form.
No, public domain means not covered by copyright. If there's "a small EULA" which depends on copyright for its force, then it's not public domain. You're thinking of "freeware".
No. It's spelled correctly. The /. editors forgot to add the sinister gregorian monk music and demon guide dogs and crows.
This is what happens when the motivating factor is to maximize profits. If someone can make a profit from it, it gets patented and copyrighted.
What is the incentive for people to give away things when the trend is to become wealthy as quickly as possible?
People who already are wealthy are the ones with the greatest means and free time to create more wealth...it is a mindset.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Within every DRM system there will always be a way for the author to set the copy rights to allow freely made copies. There are always people who want their stuff copied or who don't care or who don't want the recipient encumbered by any restrictions.
That said, PHBs and paternalist OSes from Redmond may decide the implement restrictive DRM settings for their own idiotic reasons. I noticed more than one company annual report that uses a password protected PDF to prevent copy-past operations for who knows what reason. Yet the first time a small content creator's use of DRM causes problems for their big client, the small company will "turn off" DRM.
As long as there are people that want to be heard as far and wide as possible, there will be a public domain.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
It's very likely that Lessig is right. Meanwhile, personal casual copying will continue--on a reduced level. Average consumers will have DRMed gear.
Only about one in twenty or one in a hundred will go to the effort of buying the illegally chipped merchandise that will become available in flea markets, on the Internet, and via other black-market channels. This gear will be sold like the pressed-grape-concentrate bricks of the Prohibition era, which came with detailed instructions explaining that it was totally illegal to use them to make wine and giving careful step-by-step directions on what you must not do to stay legal.
It will create more social unrest, injustice, and disrespect for the law. As with prohibition, and with current marijuana laws, a huge fraction of the population will be felons according to the law. Enforcement will be inconsistent and selective. Most people breaking the law will not be deterred because they will feel that getting caught is unlikely and totally a matter of bad luck.
My analog cassette player died last year. My old CD player is starting to become unreliable. I'm not sure what the useful life of a solid-state laser is, but I'm beginning to suspect it's less than ten years. The next one I buy will probably have DRM.
Prohibition eventually ended, the "war on drugs" will eventually end, and the war on the public domain will eventually end. Probably not in my lifetime, though, and not until a lot of damage and misery has occurred.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
This is another content free handwave - why 35 years?
Not much in the way of content, you are right. As for 35 years, it's because it was part of a larger "Here Today, Gone Tommorow" piece that is talking about what institutions that we take for granted might not be here in...you guessed it...35 years.
While I see the guys point he probably couldn't be more wrong if he tried. I never used to release anything I wrote or developed into the public domain. As restrictions increase though I am more and more inclined to release my material, in part, as a protest. Most of it is not really worth anything to anyone but me but there are a few gems in amongst it that potentially have value.
While I don't imagine everyone will follow my course I imagine that there are suficient like minded people that will do the same to ensure that we will always have a body of public domain work. As restrictions increase public domain works become more and more appealing. Public domain will never replace private domain as there is to much money in it. Public domain work, though, can certainly keep the private domain in check and limit its powers. The only danger is nutty legislation that effectivly bans public domain work and I can't ever see that happening.
I actually don't see copyright as being all that bad. In fact I would go as far as to say I quite like it. The length copyright applies for is far to long. IMHO it should be more like 20 or 30 years but I could be persuaded that it should be somewhat longer. I like the way the author doesn't have to apply to any central body to copyright a work. It just magically happens. That's great because it stops leeches making a quick buck of other peoples work.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
While it sounds catchy, it's not really as if public domain is _really_ going to die. What's going to happen is that copyright becomes stronger and lasts longer, and eventually copyrighted material might never enter the public domain again.
But plenty of people love to share their work and ideas. Some of these people are going to be putting stuff in the public domain. Also, with copyleft and similar policies, a lot of copyrighted material is going to provide similar benefits to public material (reusability).
All is not lost, and all won't be lost as long as enough people behave socially rather than trying to grab as much money and power as they can.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I RTFA, and nowhere was the term "35 years" used. However, poking around the site I see this article was one of a batch on the themes of thngs happeneng over the last 35 years (since Foreign Policy magazine began), and the next 35. So Lessig didn't choose that figure for any real reason.
The idea of public domain is that you create something, release it and relinquish any control you have over it. You can't release something as public domain but add conditions.
If you were to release an application in to the public domain and offer it as a free download from your web site, you could not stop me from simply changing the strings so that it looks like my work and then reselling it as a commercial application.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
"releasing material into the public domain" does not equal "sharing my Ray Charles Mp3s on Kazaa". Trying to release material into the public domain just won't work in fifty years, anyhow; with the continual extension of copyright and the accumulation of greater and greater amounts of material in the hands of big corporations. Eventually anyone who even wanted to make something public domain would be sued into oblivion for copy infringement, as it becomes harder and harder not to be derivitive of something that is in the vaults of the media which will stretch back over a century and a half.
``In a free society the public domain will never die. It's part of our culture.''
I much more feel that society and culture are the root of the problem. Let me explain.
One problem is the political system. Winner-take-all is a way of counting votes that basically admits only 2 parties (a 3rd party will take away votes from the party closest to it, increasing the likelihood that the less-favored party wins).
Because there are only 2 parties, and it's hard to start up a 3rd party with a fighting chance, it's hard to improve the situation once both parties start down the Dark Path.
Enormous amounts of money are invested in election campaigns. One party cannot significantly cut investments, because that is almost certainly yielding victory to the other party. Campaign money has to come from somewhere.
Both parties receive heavy sponsoring from the corporate world. It is not at all unreasonable to suspect that this might convince some politicians to view their sponsors in a favorable light, and be more inclined to pass legislation that helps these sponsors than legislation that inhibits these sponsors.
In short: what's good for the company is good for the party. There are clear signs of corporate influence on the government.
The principle of freedom of the press exists so that the media has the freedom to inform the public about political wrongs. The idea is that politicians can get away with a lot of crap as long as nobody knows, so some entity has to be responsible for keeping the public informed. This entity is the free (e.g. independent from the government) press.
The problem with the free press is that it is dominated by large corporations. These same corporations also sponsor politicians. So, on the one hand, they can influence politicians in a way that wouldn't be desirable from the small man's point of view. On the other hand, they can cover it up so that noone finds out.
So, it's the corporations pulling the strings in the important parts of society. Pair this with an individualist culture bent on material gain and personal happiness, and I think you can see how big a problem there is and how hard it is to change it.
Oh, and yes, everybody preaches freedom, liberty and democracy...but more and more freedoms are taken away. Citizens of the USA now enjoy noticably less freedom than citizens of the European countries the USA originally loathed for their authoritarianism, so I think the freedom, liberty and democracy message can be safely discarded as a lullaby to keep the uninformed public from waking up.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
More than anywhere there is a generational gap in the copyright universe. There are those, currently at the top, who want to protect the things they grew up with (Mickey Mouse, we love you - I wanted to be member of the Mickey Mouse club - haha, wasn't Mickey so cute.) And there is the current generation who, for better or worse, have no attachment to anything - everything is just play-doh to make something else. At some point there will be a changing of the guard and the public domain will rise like a phoenix.
I also think to some extent the generational gap results in over protection to those with the pocket-books. Copyright didn't play an important part of culture so the leaders aren't comfortable speaking its language. Whenever you have that situation, where a leader is relying entirely on the advice of his "counselors" you have the problem of the leader's view taking on the characteristics of the view of whomever speaks to him the most. And quite frankly those with the most get the ear. As more of us get into congress that are comfortable with the issues and have independently formed opinions, you will see a change to a more reasoned debate.
I hope.
I agree. It's not in fashion here on Slashdot to actually be optimistic about the mechanisms of change in a representative government. But what people keep forgetting is that the American government was deliberately set up to move slowly on issues of major import. Sometimes that slow pace seems good (when people are trying to overturn something you like), and sometimes it seems bad (when you're trying to turn the tide and it's difficult to do so), but it's that way for good reason.
People are already starting to fight back. Lessig, McLeod, and others are writing about copyright excesses. There are a handfull of Representatives in Congress who really understand what's going on, and they're trying to educate their peers. We lost the Eldred case at the Supreme Court, but that's certainly not the end of the road.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Lawrence Lessig raises awareness, he is a good communicator. I wonder why he does not actually act.
There is the A2k treaty project, we will get a development agenda for WIPo soon. Is Lessig accredited to WIPO? No, sure he isn't. You can make a dent there. Lawrence Lessig does not expect it to last 35 years...
Public domain -- it might be an US-only problem. Of course the works of Kafka and others are public domain in my legal system.
If it's that bad, why should I care about 880 free megs of file hosting?
Dark Reflection
Yes, this is a serious problem. To avoid it, all human beings should be forcibly compelled to document every thought they ever have, and to publish them through a centralised public database that is open to all. Concepts like privacy and secrecy should be abolished, because the right of everyone to know everything about everyone and everything is much more important than respecting the right of an individual to think their own thoughts in their own head, and only to share those thoughts they wish to share.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
That's strange, I thought that when I didn't pay the maintenance fee on my last patent that it went into the public domain. I'd be glad to hear it's still in force.
Patents may have their problems, but at least the length of time and the requirement of maintenence fees to keep them in force are appropriate.
As an intellectual property owner, I worry when Congress goes overboard in an attempt to "protect intellectual property holders' rights". Yes, I like that what I create can benefit me. However, when other people use IP as a cudgel to abuse people, it makes me worry about the stability of the whole system. If you were an aristocrat in France in 1780, wouldn't you be a little concerned about the other aristocrats who beat and starve the peasants? They might just have a revolution.
"That can be arranged."
- RIAA
"*shrug*, *BLAM*"
- Your government
This post has proved th epoint that the idea of the public domain is dying.
Open Source is not helping this situation either, there seems to be confusion between the 2 in many peoples minds.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
You're assuming that in 35 years the western countries will still rule the world.
The day that the HSD declares it 'a national security risk' and mandates the use of 'approved software' ( and hardware ).
Sure, you can still run your C64 at home, but dont expect to get online. And if you try, expect to be visited by the bit police.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It's being done and it's called bloging.
5/17 5:11pm "My cat rolled over on it's back again today"
5/17 5:15pm "I feed my cat and he liked it"
5/17 5:23pm "That voice in my head telling me to kill my cat and eat it is getting harder to resist"
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
http://www.pdinfo.com/record.htm
I quote:
Records, cassettes, CD's, and other music recordings come under a general category called Sound Recordings or Phonorecords. Before 1972, sound recordings were not protected by copyright law, but by a hodge-podge tangle of state laws. This problem was fixed with the 1972 copyright act and extended by the 1998 twenty year copyright extension. Different copyright experts have offered very different complicated explanations, but all agree that all sound recordings essentially are under copyright protection until the year 2067. So here is the one sentence you need to remember:
Sound Recording Rule of Thumb:
There are NO sound recordings in the Public Domain.
There are, of course, exceptions to everything, and there really are some PD sound recordings. However, the federal and state laws are so tangled and complicated, it is extremely difficult to do confident sound recording PD research. There are several U.S. web sites claiming that sound recordings made in the United States prior to February 15, 1972, are in the public domain, and there are links to U.S. Copyright Office publications stating: "Sound recordings fixed before February 15, 1972, are not eligible for Federal copyright protection." We have had this reviewed independently by several attorneys across the U.S. Each has confidently and independently told us that between federal and state copyright protection, virtually all sound recordings are protected until the year 2067.
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
Don't confuse communism and totalitarian systems as those created by Lenin, Stalin & Co. that were called "communism".
Marx original comunism idea specifically called for industry workers that overthrow their governing regime on their own, not purely agricutural societies forced to change by some so-called intellectuals. Real communism never called for a one-party system, nor a quasi-dictatoric board of directors in it. Instead it relies solely on self-organizational principles and true equality (In the libertarian + social security sense, everyone paid according to his needs).
Every "communist" system so far has utterly failed to even attempt employing these principles, which lead to oppression (via the "we know better" and "not with us is against us" approaches) and inequality ("Some are more equal than others", because they bear the burden of ruling...). Followed directly by restrictions, that were only necessary, because people didn't decide to become communist in the first place and didn't want to stay communist, because their infrastructure wasn't up to it (the reason Marx wanted industry workers under all circumstances!)
In short: Communism has not failed, because it has never been tried. Systems hiding under that name have failed though. Wrong names for systems is pretty common though, consider democracy, which means "ruling by the people". Nowhere does this call for parliaments!
Most of our culture like our music is produced in the private domain. It used to be that this work would be in the public domain after a small amount of time. In the current system copyright is being extended at such a rate that nothing will ever again be in the public domain. Lessig here is arguing, as he has in the past, that it is important that societies eventually own their culture. With the current mindset that the public should never own creative works, this will not happen. Imagine a world where the widely reproduced creative works from the Renassaince had to be licensed.
The parent post wasn't complaining about the price - he was complaininng about trying to enforce the division of the markets into regions. If corporations are able to take advantage of globalization to get the best possible price (eg. by outsourcing), why aren't consumers? The end result would be, of course, to level prices worldwide - which might raise the price in some markets while lowering it in others. But, it seems like the only fair way to do things.
I'm not saying that companies shouldn't be allowed to set different prices in different places - but that other people should not be prohibited from buying in the cheaper market, shipping to a more expensive market, and selling the product at an intermediate price. For example, why shouldn't Americans be allowed to buy cheaper drugs in Canada? The drug companies may profit less; they would have to raise Canadian prices and lower American prices. But, why should the law be set up to benefit the pharmaceutical company at the expense of the consumer, any more than it should benefit the consumer at the expense of the company? Efficient markets generally require a level playing field.
Never has a compnay made so much money off of the public domain also been the most ardent opponent against it.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Well, it actually has been tried a lot. However, the results of the attempts never were what Marx and Engels hoped for. All the evidence is against communism. Principles, which dozens of countries have tried with usually disastrous consequences, are very likely to be flawed.
When it comes to Public Domain in the internet world, we won't know for another couple of dozen years how it will work out, but we can of course theorize (that means "guess") about it, as Lessig does.
They haven't conquered anywhere by force
Tell that to the Native Americans and Iraqis
Agreed. As I said in another post, copyleft is akin to letting people walk on your lawn when they bulldoze the public parks. It's nice, but it doesn't make everything all better. Copyleft does not bring back those parts of the public domain which Congress gave away.
That's what I first thought, but then I read some more. Guess what. It's basically correct.
h tm0 7.html
a mmer/?p=83398276
See also:
http://www22.brinkster.com/paradio/pages/pre1972.
http://www.legallanguage.com/lawarticles/Clarida0
It seems there are three points here:
1)before 1972, copyright laws were governed by state regulations, not
national regulations.
2)Merely because they are not covered by federal copyright laws
doesn't imply that they are still owned by someone. The owners may be
dead, or the original master unavailable. I don't understand the
implications here.
3)It's unclear to me whether you can use a later phonograph/CD of an
earlier recording to digitalize. For example, if I had a 1976
phonograph of a 1933 work, and then I decide to make an mp3 of it,
it's unclear to me when it will go into the public domain.
Interestingly, they have already resolved the reproduction issue in
the area of paintings and public domain in USA.
After doing web research, I wrote here
http://www.imaginaryplanet.net/weblogs/idiotprogr
Accurate photographs of visual artworks lack expressive content and
are automatically in the public domain once the painting's
copyright
has expired (which it has in the US if it was published before 1923).
All other copyright notices can safely be ignored.
I can't comment on precedent or how to implement this fairly, but it
seems to me that we need some sort of public domain reform that
removes protection of later digitally remastered copies when the term
on an earlier recording expires. As long as the later digitally
remastered copy is simply a faithful reproduction of the earlier work,
the later digitally remastered work does not imply some new copyright
protections.
As I said, this idea is currently unworkable and would be unfair to
companies which in the 1970s and 1980s produced and sold remastered
editions. However, at some point we need to ask ourselves why
Columbia Records deserves this windfall for simply reproducing an
artistic work. If Columbia Records, for example, owns the only
pristine copy of Jelly Roll Morton's 1926 jazz songs and releases a
remastered edition in 1985, it would be sad to think it won't go into
the public domain until 2080 (150 years after the song was first
recorded).
Please, somebody, point out some gap in my understanding or a
loophole. But otherwise it looks as if it's going to be really hard
for sound recordings to go into the public domain.
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
Your post would have been more productive had you avoided calling the GNU General Public License "viral". What you think of the GPL is not on topic here, as this discussion primarily concerns how the public domain works, not your views on how distributed GPL derivatives are licensed. Similarly, a previous poster used the word "fell" to describe entry into the public domain. I'd argue that the popularity of the term in this context is irrelevant and that we are better served by examining the connotation that being in the public domain is somehow lower or lesser than being in copyright.
Getting back to your point raised by calling the GPL "viral", there is a bit of this for the public domain as well. Works in the public domain remain in the public domain even if fragments of them are built upon in other copyrighted works. There are parts of the movie Amelie which come from the Prelinger archives. These fragments are in the public domain and one can extract them from Amelie and end up with a series of public domain fragments. So, the public domain is self-preserving but this effect doesn't extend as far as the power copyright holders have in licensing derivative works. Of course, it's possible to transform the work so completely that such extraction is impossible.
Digital Citizen
Howabout we go back to the old system-
If you want copyright protection, you MUST submit your work to the library of congress or the national archives.
When your copyright term is up, the public is free to acquire information from this resource.
There you go. The compensation they get is that they are granted a temporary monopoly on the reproduction of their work. The public is guaranteed their rights to it under public domain.
Its analogous to the way that patents are supposed to work. Of course, that system is also broken...
It's not what you know, or even who you know- It's how many people recognize your damn
Read too much Marx recently?
did you miss the sarcasim?
The original idea of copyright and/or patent law (as envisioned by the founders of the USA at least) was that inventors and artists would have some incentive to publish their work rather than keeping it to themselves. For about 14 years they'd have deliberately limited control over who could copy the work so they could make some money from their own good ideas, and then it would fall into the public domain where it belongs!!
It's all written down in some obscure old document that nobody ever reads..
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