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Lessig On Free Content, Copyright
Glyn Moody writes "In an interview with the Guardian, Lawrence Lessig explains exactly how he'd like copyright reformed, and has this to say about free content: 'I think it's going to be a more significant movement than the free software movement because whatever the importance of the freedom of coders, coders will still be just a tiny proportion of the public, but culture is ... much broader.'"
The culture is effected by the media and the content in it. A great example of this is the fact that the media was able to turn the word 'liberal' into a profanity. Language is perception, and the media controls the perception of most of the people.
Whatever it is that Lessig is selling, John and Jane Sixpack ain't gonna be buying.
Shit, CNN/Foxnews will make sure they don't even see it!
Copyright laws are just like unions now. In the beginning, they both had their use, but as timee have changed, copyright laws, like unions have not adapted to suit current conditions. In the end, they cause more bad than good. Hello GM!
http://psychicfreaks.com/every historical era is defined by an ideological struggle which defines the status quo of future eras. in our time, that struggle is the balance between corporate ownership and public culture. the riaa/ mpaa won't stop until they own all of our culture, period. every single bit of expression of it. every venue, every time period
what lessig gets but many don't is that it is a trade off: financial wealth versus cultural wealth. ip law makes sense because it rewards creators for creating. but the balance gets lost when ip law is extended unnaturally into areas of content expression and lengths of time which are totally unreasonable
then the social compact between those who consume culture and those who create it, becomes null and void. the ip lawyers are crushing the natural free exchange of ideas that lead to cultural wealth, and eventually financial wealth, and their corporate masters don't understand how they are shooting themselves in the foot by giving these ip lawyers free reign to extend, extend, extend their grasp. the corporate masters don't seem to understand that, paradoxically, by extending ip law unnaturally, ip lawyers are effectively handing their corporate masters diminishing returns over the long run: decreased cultural wealth eventually leads to decreased financial wealth
its a pathology: greed, greed, greed, and it will never stop, until it kills cultural wealth in the name of financial wealth, even if that means that eventually, financial wealth is sacrificed too. because the financial masters don't really understand how the free exchange of ideas in a respected, natural, reasonable cultural public spaced eventually enriches them. they just have an unthinking pathological allegiance to the concept of bloated ownership, with no appreciation for the nuances of how respecting a free zone of cultural trading creates more riches for them to own in the long rin
unfortunately, this struggle is too esoteric now, too new to have reached the man in the street yet. only us dweebs and tech heads see the outrageousness of this creeping doom on the horizon right now. but give it time. eventually it will rear its ugly head on the radar of public consciousness
and then maybe, hopefully, this pathology that is ip law that wants to own absolutely every bit of cultural expression will get the bitch slap down it deserves
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Supposing I write a significantly different story, using existing concepts in only a vague way, and develop (or discover) a market for that story, I should be able to tap into that market, exclusively, for a given period of time. The idea is "mine" (humanly speaking), and supposing the content isn't prurient (e.g. child porn), or a damn lie (e.g. telling you that the Olsen Twins are morbidly obese) or some other nasty damnable shite ("I murdered Bob's wife! Here's how & all the details"), I have every right to profit from it.
If Joseph E. Schmoe buys my book & decides to resell it before, or after, he reads it, that's fine. I'd like to have a profit off of it, but I do not, and I should not. Joe sells it to Bookz By The Tunn, and they resell it. Perhaps I'll get some name recognition, but that at the most.
Joe's brother, Ed, cannot copy my book, change all of the "I have"'s to "I have not"'s or change the meaning in some other way and republish it under my name.
Joe's brother can, however, quote some of the book and parody it. I may not like the parody, I may take it in stride, but I probably can't prosecute him.
This will require a paradigm shift from the sole creator and possesor of a 'natural right' of control and ownership of ideas.
Coders collaborate to create complex things whereas artists are often individualistic sorts, possesie of their ideas. As an art student my college would not mark 'collaborative' works as they could not figure out how to apportion credit.
Open source Creativity has occured but the very word Artist has a certain idea of sole author - seemingly this came about in the Rennaissance. When Vasari started bigging up Michelangelo.
Before this it was believed that Authorship was a kind of heresy as God was the Prime Creator. Many Artists and Author before then saw themselves as part of a stream of culture and thought. They would attribute their works to historical figures or were anonymous.
The Public Domain has fallen into disrepute, it is a kind of 'bin' were all the old stuff ends up. Copyright a limited monopoly for publishers, a concession by the public was concieved to enrich this public sphere. Now Copyright is seen by many as a sort of natural right of creators.
Better to believe that you stand apon the shoulders of giants, that personal art derives from the canon of language, culture, folk-music that once was commonly owned by all ( or rather the nature of property was inimicable to ideas ).
Interestingly Publicly funded Science has moved away from the public domain and instead of researchers publishing findings for the common weal they patent with their University.
While dreams of rich patents may provide investment funds to inventors, consider that the price of research has increased astronomically as progress accelerates there are more sub-patents to be liscensed (or withheld to prevent rival research).
Now there are so many Patent & Copyright Squatters who neither create nor fund creators but use law to leech fees from those who do.
Thank goodness you can't patent software or algorythms (in Europe anyway).
Copyright is theft from the Public domain.
It used to be that we got some payback, now we just pay and pay and pay.
. . .one of the major reasons for the lengthening of copyright terms in the US is that we needed to bring our laws in line with the copyright laws in Europe
The question is should we have done this? Especially since the copyright laws of Europe were (and are) antithetical to American legal philosophy. They are founded on the medieval monarchial grant/guild system of rights. It seems strange to me that we should export "American values" at the point of a gun in some places, but refuse to actually hold our simple moral ground at home. In this case I think we should have made Europe come to us.
I fear that this particular step would only further help the moneyed interests at the expense of the little guy.
History shows just the opposite. If nothing else look what Lessig did with This Land is Your Land.
The primal philosophy is that of free speach. To get a grant to abrogate this you should have to actually petition the government for the rights of monopoly. Yes, there is a fee involved, but it has always been reasonable to cover filing costs and not a center of control/profit. A teenager can cover the fee by mowing a single lawn and the forms are simple; and free.
The automatic creation of copyright has also created a world of abuse by the big guy against the little guy, the big guy sometimes being the government. Internal memos and such showing criminal action and culpability are now being supressed using their copyright status as justification. Civil lawsuits have skyrocketed where none would have been filable previously over purely incidental "works" little more than someone's laundry list.
Copyright should only be applied to those works that the creator himself thinks important enough to go through the trouble of filing and said works should then be free to public access.
That, after all, was the whole original point. That protected works would be made available to the public, put on file in the Library of Congress, rather than hidden away. Conversely anything that the creator wants hidden away (like evidence of criminal activity) should not be granted protection.
KFG
No he's not. I don't know much about him and I dont need to other than the fact that his solution is not to get rid of copyrights but to make them "nicer". While this sounds "reasonable", the media industry has simply used him to pasify and tease us with unrealistic solutions while they go for total information controll. Historically the same thing happened with the people who wanted a compromise between the free states and the slave states, their insistence on a nicer form of slavery instead of abolition simply sidesteped the issue and delayed justice and prolonged pain for millions of people and in the end made those who wanted a compromise usless and irrelavent parasites.
So please let me explain the ugly truth: this is an all or nothing game. Either the copyright lords are going to control how we use information, or they aren't. Sorry charlie, there is no nice way out there is no happy middle ground. Get used to it, wake up and smell the hummis, pull your head out, quit being stupid! All or nothing. Sony, the RIAA, and MPAA seem to understand this perfectly well, their actions are obvious, they plan on it, they act on it, they clearly understand it, so why don't we?
"[...] it's going to be a more significant movement than the free software movement because whatever the importance of the freedom of coders, coders will still be just a tiny proportion of the public[...]"
The free software movement (free as in freedom) directly affects programmers by giving them the source code and ability to change it, but this also indirectly allows anyone the power to have problems fixed by whomever he or she wants to hire. In the arena of computer software, what more freedom could you need?
Creative Commons can become what GPL is to software, something which liberates the content from the misuse and apprehension of huge corporations. Free Software Foundation and the GPL-licenses was invented as a reaction to ever increasing prices, EULAs, NDAs, copyright lengths, and every other toll-booth the corporations will impose just to squeeze the last drop of money out of our souls, for software.
With Creative Commons, we have a chance to reclaim our culture as a whole. A real, culture, indie artists, not sponsored and RIAA-breastfed brats copying the latest fad.
The irony being, that the stronger copyright becomes by lobbying from the corporations, the stronger Creative Commons and GPL also become.
In the long-term future, I believe in a reclamation of our culture on the local level too. More people will be fed up with way too many hours spent in front of a screen, and desensitized by an everlasting surge of noise in their ears. People will start to appreciate silence more and more, not in hordes, because that is a paradox in its own right. However, slowly more and more will look for alternative ways, something local. Playing in a local band, or just with friends. Meditation. Yoga. Tai-Chi. Quigong. Whatever to breathe life back into the soul.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
I think the key concept in intellectual property laws should be that the creations *must* enter public domain at some time, and remain in the public domain forecer after that. Therefore, the law should provide no protection at all to anything that's protected by anything other than the law itself, or for that which isn't fully disclosed.
No copyrights for anything distributed with any sort of DRM, no copyrights for anything distributed under proprietary standards, no protection for any software distributed without source code.
There are more than one issue here:
No, it's 'is,' not 'are.' Since 'issue' is singular, you need to use 'is.' If you said that there were many issues here, then you'd use 'are,' because 'issues' is plural.
Ability to create content and distribute it , exclusively, for profit, for a period of time.
Supposing I write a significantly different story, using existing concepts in only a vague way, and develop (or discover) a market for that story, I should be able to tap into that market, exclusively, for a given period of time. The idea is "mine" (humanly speaking), and supposing the content isn't prurient (e.g. child porn), or a damn lie (e.g. telling you that the Olsen Twins are morbidly obese) or some other nasty damnable shite ("I murdered Bob's wife! Here's how & all the details"), I have every right to profit from it.
First, n.b. that copyright doesn't protect ideas. Second, you haven't provided any support for your assertion that you should have an exclusive right merely because you came up with the idea. Remember, if you want exclusivity, you are essentially asking everyone else in the world to refrain, and to create laws (which you could not create on your own) that establish that exclusivity. While I am not averse to doing so, I won't unless you can show me that I am better off being excluded than I would be if there was no exclusive right. Of course, you have every right to profit from your creation, but exclusivity is another matter altogether.
Ability to maintain the integrity of content.
Joe's brother, Ed, cannot copy my book, change all of the "I have"'s to "I have not"'s or change the meaning in some other way and republish it under my name.
Meh. That's more a trademark or publicity right issue than a copyright issue.
Mixing / excerpting Joe can copy small excerpts of my book when writing a review, or larger portions with my permission. Were this music, he would be legally more restricted in rebroadcasting because of the medium. Print has its own restrictions, because it's a physical medium.
Why the different treatment? I don't see any material differences. If I can make collage out of photos, say, why shouldn't I be able to make collage out of music, or text?
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
So please let me explain the ugly truth: this is an all or nothing game. Either the copyright lords are going to control how we use information, or they aren't. Sorry charlie, there is no nice way out there is no happy middle ground. Get used to it, wake up and smell the hummis, pull your head out, quit being stupid! All or nothing. Sony, the RIAA, and MPAA seem to understand this perfectly well, their actions are obvious, they plan on it, they act on it, they clearly understand it, so why don't we?
Your observation about it being an all or nothing game is correct, but I don't think you are correct in your conclusion.
First of all, abolishing copyright will do nothing to remove the desire for distributors to have complete and infinite control over distribution and preferably also use. This is because copyright is merely the means by which this control is currently achieved.
Second, copyright based on the constitution of the USA can only exist if you recognize that the 'public' is in ultimate control over any copyrighted works, else the whole concept of granting temporary exclusive rights to the creator makes no sense (you may be able to grant rights over something over which you have no control on paper, but your lack of control makes that a completely pointless thing to do), so if copyright has to be, then the question over who has ultimate control over created works is already answered.
At any rate, the article was (unsurprisingly) lacking in detail, and failed to make any argument for the alternative that was proposed (or for or against copyright in general). It merely points at one of the problems and an obvious solution to it. The implication of what the article says is that 'initially, copyright as it was in the 1700s was good, so lets change back to how it was back then'. Of course that ignores that circumstances have changed substantially. I, just like Lessig it seems, believe that a limited term, limited scope copyright can actually work and advance science and arts. Additionally, I also believe that copyright should always go to the actual creator(s) and be non-transferable. On top of that, I believe anyone who wants to have something protected by copyright, will have to ensure that the work will be available in unencumbered form after expiration of that copyright, if things like drm or other forms of access control are permitted at all.
Not really. The article (I won't say Lessig, because the article may be distorting his views) ignores the fact that the GPL relies on copyright. Only with copyright can a GPL licensor ensure that other users of her code grant access to the source code.
Perhaps a better analogy for the point the article is making would be the BSD license, which has spurred creativity without the heavy reliance on copyright that is a feature of the GPL.
But overall the article is unconvincing because it ignores the fact that both GPL and BSD-licensed software exist even though (and indeed because) we have today's regime of long copyrights. One can certainly argue that the state's scarce resources are better spent on things other than enforcing 50-year-old copyrights (or even on enforcing some 1-year-old copyrights.) But creativity isn't being stifled by long copyrights--to the contrary, the Internet is promoting new waves of creativity, with scores of authors of works of all kinds--software, photographs, writings, and more--willingly submitting their works to the public for its use.
Penny - plain text accounting
As much as I respect vruz's works and achievements, he/she/it is clearly dead wrong this time.
Birdwatching will continue to be an important part of culture.
Okay, so the parallel isn't very good, but the point is that you're criticizing Lessig for something he didn't say. He didn't say that free software isn't important, he said it is a smaller issue than free culture.
I understand you're saying that software freedom can help to protect free culture, but that's only because free software is one of the few forces currently acting to counteract the media industry's push to lock up our culture. If we can help the rest of the world understand the importance of our cultural data being free to flow around and not locked up either by code or by law, then free software's importance to free culture will decline to almost nil.
I think Lessig is right: free software is a subset of free culture, and a small one. The fact that the free software movement predated the free culture movement (such as it is) doesn't mean it's more important or a prerequisite. The reason it came first is because it's computer technology that made this sort of freedom an issue, and it's reasonable to expect that those closest to the technology (programmers) should see the impact of the changes first, and that they should first take action to protect the freedom of the cultural objects that most interest them (programs).
None of this is meant to minimize the importance of free software. Instead, it should put the massive important of free culture into perspective.
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Sidewalk entertainers.
Fan Fiction (yes, it existed before the Internet)
Graffiti Art
There were tons of people who created and gave away their creations before the Internet. The difference is that before the Internet only people right nearby KNEW about them. Their was no ultra-cheap/free distribution method to get the creations of these people out into the hands of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of other people.
Many writers existed making stories for free. They wrote stories, books, novels... and were either uninterested or incompitent in trying to get them published. So who got to read them? Their family, neighbors, and friends. And that's it.
Many artists existed making paintings and drawings for free. Who saw them? Their family, neighbors, and friends. And that's it.
Many musicians existed who gave their music away for free or cost on casette tapes and such. Who heard them? Their family, neighbors, and friends, and maybe the local bars. And that's it.
People creating stuff for others, and giving it away for nothing or almost nothing, have always existed. But until the Internet, only a few people nearby knew about them. You probably knew someone yourself who fits this description (at least, if you're old enough to have known lots of people before 1995). Now, these same people can reach millions with a little technical savvy, or a friend with that savvy.
The Internet has made us the neighbors of everyone on the 'Net. We're all just one step away from everyone else. Just a visit, a quick jaunt across the street to read the latest writings, hear the newest song, or see the newest painting of that guy next door.
So nothing has changed. We just have more neighbors now.
The Raven
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
You've never heard of "The Grateful Dead"?
They permitted taping of their concerts and trading of the tapes since very nearly their first concert. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grateful_Dead#Tapers
As long as the tapes weren't being used for commercial profit, it was effectively a free-for-all, to the point of them setting up a "taper's area" to allow their own sound crew to have access to the area where they'd need to set up their equipment for the best sound for the concert.
There were/are a number of other bands that had/have the same practice: Rat Dog, The Other Ones, etc..
-- Terry
no copyright law also sounds like a bad idea, especially to the people who come up with copyrightable things. i can get behind what lessig is pushing for.
No.
.sig here on Slashdot.
Currently, all it requires is either a) waiting for the term to expire, or b) having the copyright holder place the work into the public domain, which can be as simple as the statement in my
If we revitalized formalities, works would be in the public domain if they were not copyrighted by a certain point in time, e.g. upon publication. Or we could set a short span of time, e.g. 5 years after creation or 1 year after publication, whichever comes first. (Something similar already exists for patents)
With a formalized registration system, it would remove a lot of the uncertainty about whether or not works are copyrighted, since all the copyrighted works would be listed and it would not be terribly difficult to determine whether a work was in the registry or not.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
To write a program that generated _huge_ (TBs) amounts of content; speaches/essays/articles about the current state of politics including the real players out there today, and what's really going on and copyright them. Then sue anyone who you don't agree with politically who writes an article that comes close enough to your generated content that their 'political free speach' could be considered infringing.
Could it technically work? What would those cases do to the laws?
How can we convince people that copyright laws are out of wack when they legally can't sing 'happy birthday' to their kids at their birthday party without paying royalties...
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Your premise is incorrect because you don't understand copyright.
Hehe... I understand copyright *very* well. About as well as anyone who isn't an IP lawyer, I think.
The ONLY thing that big media can LOCK UP is stuff they've created.
Plus anything that can be argued is derived from it. Seriously, read "Free Culture". Start with the introduction, about Walt Disney's "Steamboat Willie" and Buster Keaton's "Steamboat Bill, Jr.".
Remember you all are talking about content created by big business, not small time content creators. And the last is that none of the complainers had a hand in the creaton of the content they claim as their culture.
You're using too narrow a definition of "culture". Everything that gets published and becomes widespread is part of our culture. But much of it is off-limits for extension, enhancement, modification, etc. Until it's 100 years old, anyway, and maybe not even then, given continual extension, DRM, etc.
Seriously. Read "Free Culture". If you don't mind reading from a screen, it's a free download. Or you can download it and print it. Or buy a bound copy in the bookstore. Whatever. Read it.
If they want free culture as much as they want free software, then the solution is the same in both cases. Create it yourself instead of pirating commercial software.
Software is actually much easier to handle, because (so far) the laws and the courts haven't decided that making software that is similar to something else is infringement. That's not the case with movies, stories and music. Using a baseline lifted from another song is copyright infringement (David Bowie vs Vanilla Ice). Using a similar storyline is copyright infringement (see the case about the Harry Potter knockoffs). Using characters with the same, or even similar names is copyright infringement.
The media industry has gotten copyright stretched to where it no longer serves the public interest.
Since OSS is part of MY culture, can I treat it like public domain?
Nope, and you shouldn't be able to, not without the author's permission. However, you can read it, learn from it, and write your own software that uses the ideas, algorithms, etc. from it. Or you can do whatever else you want within the license. Or you should be able to wait a short period of time for it to enter the public domain. I think copyright law should make sure you have the same freedom with all copyrighted software (copyright protection should require source disclosure).
Copyright is an excellent idea and a useful tool, but only when it's structured so that it serves the public interest. Right now, it's not structured that way. It needs to be fixed, and Lessig has some great ideas about how.
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Sorry, but your "truth" is anything but. What's needed is less extremism such as this, and more work towards achieving workable solutions that are fair to those on both sides of the equation, e.g., those who create the content, and those who consume and enjoy it.
I don't think the current copyright situation is fair, and I believe that works should be generally unemcumbered, subject to "fair use", and that the copyright term should be limited. That said, I think we also need to recognize that the stuff we love takes time, energy, money, and highly skilled and talented people to create, that they do so on a risk/reward basis, and that most of them need to pay the rent just like we do.
In other words, both sides have "rights" and any solution needs to respect that fact. Any solution that doesn't is simply not going to work...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.