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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.
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.
Idiots. To use copyright maximalist terminology: they're *stealing* from the public domain.
"Copyfraud" - I like it. Coining a new term is an offensive maneuver, and offense seems like a better political strategy than the defensive whining we always do on slashdot. Now we just need to start floating ridiculous proposals to counterbalance the copyright lobby's ridiculousness and re-center the discussion on what a reasonable public policy should be.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
So people should do that with these "stolen" works: scan them in and submit them to Project Gutenberg. I'd be very interested in what the copyright claimer would do about that.
(But my fear is that it's going to be determined by who can afford the most lawyers.)
> 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.
This is because it isn't under the Act at all, nor should it be. It is ordinary fraud and should be prosecuted as such. The fact that the Act provides no penalties for it does not mean that nothing can be done.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Capitalism doesn't recognize anything that cannot be monetized. And capitalism is also averse to anything being public -- the argument being the tragedy of the commons, which is this: For any shared responsibility, the more people sharing that responsibility, the less responsible each person will be, until everyone is effectively irresponsible, thus the public utility becomes useless/abused/less valuable.
Capitalism is a fine concept for tangible items. But it's not very good at all for intangibles. Nonetheless, as we moved from a production-based economy to a service-based one, these intangibles had to be protected by businesses somehow, so as to ensure their continued relevance and profitability. The hasty modifications to trade secret, copyright, and patent law, was a poor attempt to bridge this gap, and there was little or no public input. Simply put, society didn't have the time or attention devoted to addressing the changing landscape, because most of us at that time either weren't educated about it, or struggling to put food on the table and change careers to adapt to the changing economy. We were so focused on the immediate result that we all but ignored future consequences.
Using bait terms won't solve the problem. "Copyfraud" sounds great, but it's meaningless. It's the same with a lot of other terms -- "Net neutrality" comes to mind -- to the uninformed, it sounds good but isn't very descriptive. "Copy fraud" could mean "copying as a means of fraud" -- which is exactly what many businesses are calling the free sharing of digitized information.
We have three options here, which are not mutually exclusive:
1. Vote with your dollars. Don't buy products that have an effective cost of zero to own. Put another way - stop buying anything in a purely digital format. Instead, only buy periphery products -- such as warranties, service level agreements, support, or mp3 players, televisions, etc. This will eventually starve out business models that depend on selling products that should be free, and allow business models that support this paradigm shift to free information to flourish.
2. Stay in the system. Buy out public product and design licensing that ensures they remain public, and then put those rights in a shell corporate. GNU comes to mind, with their GPL licensing, and the many derivatives thereof. By gaming the system in this fashion, GNU is ensuring that copyright enforcement actions will always be in their favor. Over a long enough time frame, they will win the "war", because companies that cannot provide alternatives to public-domain product will go out of business. Ironically, it's one of the best arguments for innovation out there. The only catch is--Placing something in the public domain or having it remain there still has a monentary cost, however low. So far, the community hasn't addressed this systemically.
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.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Our copyright laws are focused on making money for companies. They should be focused on making works as available as possible while still encouraging the creation of new works.
It's one of the clearest examples of how our government has been sold and does not exist primarily for the people.
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.
This statement is an example of the same sort of "logic" used by the public-domain squatters: It's technically true, but very misleading. It doesn't matter if the Copyright Act doesn't provide penalties; there are plenty of other laws that apply. One thing these companies are guilty of is commonly called "consumer fraud", and large penalties can apply in such cases.
The real problem is the lack of prosecution, mostly because it typically takes a class-action lawsuit to get enough money behind it to challenge a company's legal budget. Local DAs tend to take a "not my job" attitude to such things, so it requires organized community action to fight such fraud.
Maybe what we should be doing is documenting cases of such fraud, and publicizing them when the topic comes up in forums like this one.
Anyone want to post a list of some of their favorite fraudulent claims of ownership of public-domain material?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
from children's stories and then they make their own copyrighted version of it.
Snow White
Alice in Wonderland
Peter Pan
Sleeping Beauty
Beauty and the Beast
The Little Mermaid
The Lion King
The Jungle Book
Etc.
The copyright from such fair tales and children's stories have expired and they got released to the public domain. Then Disney takes them and rewrites them slightly to have a Disney twist. Then Disney copyrights them.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Project Gutenberg has an *excellent* clearance team to determine the copyright constraints of work. I know because I use to be a PG volunteer until I ran out of free time =(
I can bottle rain water and sell it to stupid people. I can take communication bandwidth which costs me nothing extra and charge people every time they send a single text message over it. I can make something people can make themselves and charge 10 times the value of the components. I can send spam to millions of people and let them send me money. If people don't take the time to evaluate their purchases, capitalism dies. We should be encouraging people not to buy junk that falls apart, so the companies go out of business. If they pay for Linux but can get it for free, should Red Hat go out of business?
I know, Red Hat is only putting a copyright on their additions, but how do we make this distinction clear from whatever else this whining is about?
Someone who takes an out of copyright text and prints it has provided a service and deserves to be paid for it. If they make any additions to the text, such as editorializing or checking or whatever, the updates are now copyright of the people who printed it. I can take an original Beethoven score and reproduce it, but if I take an editorialized edition produced 10 years ago, I can't distribute that for free because of the value added by the publisher. In most cases, origianl scores are written in old-style notation and must be updated to make sense to today's musicians, and that conversion is a new, protected work.
So the real complaint is the narrow bunch of stuff which is being reproduced, verbatim, with a copyright attached. And the real concern isn't even that businesses are making money - it's simply that copyright is being asserted. Yes?
My understanding is that even if you take something in the public domain, your arrangement of it can be copyrighted.
For example, a phone book. The data itself cannot be copyrighted. The presentation can. If you stick it in a photocopier and sell the copies, that's a problem. They give the phone book away, so giving away a copy is technically illegal but probably won't be enforced. If you re-type everything and get the company logos from the companies and effectively reproduce it so it looks nearly enough the same, you could get sued for copying the presentation - not the contents.
In this case of Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan, where the book is essentially scans of another book, there are parts of the book which are copyrighted. The cover is, any forward or editorial material is, notes included. Anything that was added is copyrighted, and copyright law has only one way of distinguishing that. You put the copyright notice on it like you do anything else. Would you rather make an author call out which parts of the book are covered and are not? On every page?
Put another way, a derivative work of something in copyright is not allowed. A derivative work of something out of copyright is essentially a new work. You can still go back to the source and copy it for free - that hasn't been changed.
So the complaint is really just about the fact that people *might not* understand how copyright law works, and *might* pay money to a company that makes it easily accessible instead of rummaging around trying to find the original. I see no problem here. People need to know how laws work in order to live other parts of their lives, so let's just consider this a place where people need to understand exactly what copyright means.
The RIAA, MPAA, etc. all claim insanely high valuations for copyrighted content; witness the latest verdic against now-convicted "pirate" Jamie Thomas-Rasset who is now on the hook for 1.92 million. Fine. Let them copyright to their heart's content.
But let's also update the tax code to capture the full monetary value of these copyrighted works. Oh, and since "intellectual property" does not deteriorate over time as would a piece of real property, the tax code should explicitly disallow depreciation.
I suggest we start collecting back taxes on all of those old "Steamboat Willie" cartoons that Disney started putting out in the early part of the 20th century, along with old music catalogs and so forth. Let's see how truly valuable these IP assets are, and how many are suddenly not worth keeping copyrighted.
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster
Remember how the movie It's a Wonderful Life used to be played in the afternoon on every single station with air time to fill leading up to Christmas? This happened because the movie bombed in the box office, and the studio didn't bother to renew the copyright.
Then Aaron Spelling bought up various IP rights relating to the movie, such as ownership of a song used in one scene. He assumed control over distribution of the movie, based on a complicated legal theory that a lot of IP lawyers consider totally bogus. But this theory has never been challenged in court, and never will be — nobody's going to start an expensive legal battle over their right to show a movie without paying a fee.
Another one that really bothers me: the documentary Mad Hot Ballroom, about NYC elementary school kids learning ballroom dancing. Lots of music, of course, and that ended up costing them lots of money in "clearance fees" for the right to use it. How much? By the time it went to DVD, $140,000, almost half the cost of making the movie.
People who make this kind of movie don't have a lot of cash to throw around, so they did what they could to minimize it. At first, they only paid for the rights for a couple of weeks, so they could show the film on the festival circuit, and get some investors to cover the rest. They also dubbed over any music that they thought wasn't important to the movie, such as a scene where some kids are playing a video game.
One particular outrageous case: there's a scene where a woman is walking down the street, and her cell phone rings for 6 seconds before she answers it. The ring tone is the theme from Rocky, and the director decided she had to have that little bit of music to make the scene work. For that she needed clearance from Sprint (ring tone rights) and EMI (publishing rights). Sprint saw it as product placement and let her have clearance for free. But EMI wanted $10K! She finally bargained them down to $2K. Even so, she winces every time she see that scene, and has to tell herself that that six seconds was worth that much.
She told an interviewer that if had known what a big hassle music clearance was going to be, she probably wouldn't have made the movie.
Now, all you amateur lawyers are screaming FAIR USE! FAIR USE! . And for once you're right. Every lawyer I've heard talk about the subject agrees that music that happens to be overheard while making a documentary is fair use; only music performed for the film requires clearance. This is not just pro-electronic-free types. This includes pro-industry lawyers with a very narrow definition of fair use!
But despite the unanimity of legal opinion, this hasn't really been tested in court. Insurance companies that bond productions prefer to err on the side of caution, and the entertainment conglomerates that control facilities and distribution networks have an interest in keeping things narrow. Everybody agrees that if there's ever a test case, the documentary-use-is-fair-use doctrine will almost certainly prevail.
But will there ever be a test case? Again, money is an issue. When you're struggling to raise a hundred K or two to get your indie documentary made, an expensive court battle is just not an option.
Legal joke: "Sir, I've examined the evidence, and you have an extremely good case. The only question I have for you is this: How much justice can you afford?"
The tune for the Happy Birthday song was composed in 1893, and the lyrics have been around since 1912. But since the copyright was registered in 1935, we've all been paying royalties, on it, and will forever...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday_to_You
This is copyright fraud, but it's so small that noone will take the time and money to the courts to fix it.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
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
You've painted a very black-and-white, either-or scenario. I think that the anti-copyright sentiment often expressed here on Slashdot is generally targeted against the locking up of our culture by large media organisation with deep pockets used to lobby congress and trample upon individuals with punitive lawsuits.
I believe an insistence that copyright be respected for GPL licenced software sits perfectly well with a desire for a more balanced copyright regime - one with much shorter copyright durations, and where people are free to exercise their fair-use rights without being criminalised by the DMCA.
It would have been nice if the summary had named this "single company". Apparenly, if I read the article correctly, they are called "Kessinger Publishing".
Bringing public attention to corporate misdeeds is a very effective way to encourage better behavior on their part. Here's some possibly useful information:
Kessinger Publishing
PO Box 1404, Whitefish, MT 59937, United States
(605)892-0560, (605)892-0561 fax, http://www.kessinger.net/
Kessinger Publishing appears to be a privately held corporation and I didn't find any names of owners or management. I'm betting someone with Lexis access could find that info.
You are welcome on my lawn.