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Copyfraud Is Stealing the Public Domain
malkavian writes "This community has complained long and loudly about the very one-sided approach to copyright, and the not-so-slow erosion of the public domain. On top of the corporate lobbying to remove increasingly larger parts of the public domain, there is now an growing pattern whereby works are directly taken from the public domain and effectively stolen by a single company leveraging protections provided under copyright law. The Register's article is based on a paper by Jason Mazzone at the Brooklyn Law School, which starkly details the problems that are now becoming evident as entities grab control over public domain works. The paper proposes some possible solutions, such as amending the Copyright Act. From the abstract: 'Copyright law itself creates strong incentives for copyfraud. The Copyright Act provides for no civil penalty for falsely claiming ownership of public domain materials. There is also no remedy under the Act for individuals who wrongly refrain from legal copying or who make payment for permission to copy something they are in fact entitled to use for free. While falsely claiming copyright is technically a criminal offense under the Act, prosecutions are extremely rare. These circumstances have produced fraud on an untold scale, with millions of works in the public domain deemed copyrighted, and countless dollars paid out every year in licensing fees to make copies that could be made for free.'"
Congratulations; you've discovered Project Gutenberg.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Even better, Project Gutenberg Australia http://gutenberg.net.au/ , which has much looser copyrights. I think public domain there starts in 1954.
The paper was written in 1869.
And when was the editing and typesetting for the edition you used done? Do you know that there area lot of public domain music works but very few recorded performances that are in the public domain?
Publishers like Kessinger Publishing specialized in maintaing and providing a means for acquiring out of print public works. They served a very valuable purpose at one point but the internet, Project Gutenberg, even Google should make them obsolete soon. We're in a transition period.
The issue with the Google books is that they don't have the original 1800s printing of the first volume. That's why they had to rely on Kessinger. Kessinger publishes both volumes of Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan and the second original printing is free on Google books. Google faces the problem of not being able to re-edit or do its own typesetting of the first edition so instead of risking litigation they just put up what they can. They cannot fight these fights for every book. I think the copyfraud label applied to them is misplaced and will soon be a non-issue as others step forward with their personal collections to offer up to the internet.
My work here is dung.
Some of this has been solved through copyright changes. Now everything is automatically copyrighted and if one can prove providence, then one can stop the theft of intellectual property. If one has the money. This still does not necessarily eliminate the threat from derivative works, which explains the GPL viral nature. Not only is this work GPL and in the public domain, but anything derived from it. This is only way to insure that the authors original intent, to have product in the public domain, is heeded. One might complain that the at some point the authors wishes should not be in play, and the work should enter the more general lawless public domain. Such issues though are not unique to the GPL. Such issues are governed by more general rules such as the leagth of copyright(essentially forever) and the applicability of the EULA. If the length of copyright were at most the lifetime of the author, and EULA were not allowed to excessively restrict free use by the user, for instant to disallow first sale doctrine and fair use, then these would not be an issue for the GPL either.
But they are issues, and the GPL does appear to provide a good protection against theft from the public domain, which is why those that make a living stealing from the public good are so against it. Of course they are. These companies seldom give anything back , at least not without a huge price tag. The one time that Bill Gates accidently gave something away, . Of course now an occasional tuppence are given to select beneficiaries to cloud the guilt, but there you are. he GPL is evil because it prevents thefts and insure the public domain. Which is, apparently, a very bad thing to do.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I requested a paper via interlibrary loan, and attached was the standard boilerplate that it is copyrighted work, a licensing fee had been paid for the copy to be used only for the purposes of scholarly research, additional copies were $1.25 each to be paid to XXXXXX, ... blah, blah blah. The paper was written in 1869.
This is a good example of one type of sneaky wording that is probably technically true, but means something very different from what most people think it means. The claimed copyright is probably valid, but it applies to that printed edition of the work. The words themselves aren't copyrightable, but you can still get a copyright on a specific printed form of the work. But note that the publisher didn't say this; they used the common technique of just saying "copyright" or used the standard circled 'c' copyright symbol, and didn't quite say what was copyrighted. (If you misunderstood what they were claiming copyright to, well, it's not their problem that you are so ignorant of copyright law. ;-)
They probably can legally charge a price for a printed copy of their specific printed edition of the work. But if you were to type the words into your computer and put them online, they'd probably be careful when making a copyright claim, because claiming that they own the words would be fraud. This is how sites like Project Gutenberg work; they ask people to type up the text of works that are out of copyright, and they put the words online formatted differently from any printed version. That way, they aren't violating the copyright on any printed edition.
I've seen a bit of this from working with a group that's putting a lot of music online in a compact computerized data format. There are several formats competing now, with ABC in the lead, and formats like LilyPond, RoseGarden, and Music[X]ML with active development of interesting software. Most of the online music is old, 1800s or earlier, in great part due to copyright considerations. Still, I've read of a number of cases where some publisher sends a nasty C&D letter to someone with such music on their site. The site's owner talks a bit on some forums, then sends a reply of the form "That music was published by So-and-So in London in 1723. My file is not a scan of your publication or any other publication. How are you claiming ownership of the music?" The publisher understands that they've been caught in an attempt at consumer fraud, and so far they have always slunk away and aren't heard from again. Until we read in some forum that another user of the software has received a nasty C&D message.
Actually, sometimes it works differently. My web site has copies of the transcription of the three O'Neill's volumes (that every traditional Irish musician will know). The transcribing was done by a small team of musicians. I did a search for current printed editions, found that Mel Bay makes some very good ones (that open flat on a music stand). So I put links to melbay.com in my pages describing the collection, recommending these editions to anyone who would like a good printed copy. A few months later, I got a nice message from a Mel Bay employee, thanking me for referring people to them. There was no hint that they were unhappy with our online "edition". Someone there understood that my site was good advertising for them. Their editions of such old music also contain copyright notices at the beginning that says fairly clearly that it's their printed edition that is covered. The actual pages of music often don't even contain copyright notices, apparently because they often use copies of the original printing plates, which are out of copyright now (and hidden away in a library somewhere).
So some publishers are trying to do such things right. We should encourage them.
(I also like to use such things in discussions of how threatened publishers are by online editions. Printed editions of music that's available online are often selling pretty well. T
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Wonderful comment. You'll get your +5 mod anyway, so I'd rather comment on your last "option":
3. Ignore it completely. Go about your business. Encourage your friends to do the same. Ignore law enforcement demands, company demands, government demands. They're idiots, you're enlightened, Watch it become a "War on Drugs" and our country become irrelevant in the world economics as it tears itself apart trying to enforce a hopelessly doomed social constraint mechanism. If we cannot succeed domestically, we'll wait until we, as a culture, simply die out from international pressure. *shrug* It's not the most patriotic solution, but it's practical.
Unfortunately that's not the way it goes. There's no you, and us, and patriotism anymore. It's them benefiting from endless copyright vs. us humankind that would benefit from knowledge in the public domain. If the status-quo changes they'll lose their 3rd yacht, and their army of lawyers will need professional reorientation. They have everything to lose and they won't give up easily.
The RIAA and MPAA might be U.S.-based, but they're everywhere; they just go by different names. Haven't you noticed Swedish online service providers being held liable for $3.5 million for copyright violations that never happened? Or the 3-strikes law that was passed by the French legislative body, and they were barely saved by their constitutional court? Or the traffic filtering efforts in the U.K.?
Expect the Author's Guild to follow suit once they figure out how to do it internationally. We have yet to find out what ACTA brings upon us.
So it's not just about your culture, but our culture. If you're waiting for international pressure, sorry to disappoint you: they got to us too. And I somehow doubt the blatant copyright violators like China and revolution-torn Iran will fill that role.