Slashdot Mirror
The "Copyright Black Hole" Swallowing Our Culture
An anonymous reader writes "James Boyle, professor at Duke Law School, has a piece in the Financial Times in which he argues that a 'copyright black hole is swallowing our culture.' He explains some of the issues surrounding Google Books, and makes the point that these issues wouldn't exist if we had a sane copyright law. Relatedly, in recent statements to the still-skeptical European Commission, Google has defended their book database by saying that it helps to make the Internet democratic. Others have noted that the database could negatively affect some researchers for whom a book's subject matter isn't always why they read it."
helps to make the internet democratic.
Lets ask ourselves how many governments around the world don't want the Internet to be more democratic.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
As a lawyer working in the area, I highly recommend Boyle's book, 'The Public Domain' - available under a Creative Commons licence, as well as in dead-tree format.
A fascinating (and easy to read) discussion about the concept of 'the public domain', which is well worth reading for anyone who cares about the future of technological development / societal impact of overbearing IP regulation etc.
...so much so that places like /., which quite often provide original thinking upon a variety of subjects to anybody cunning enough to use a web crawler, should think about including "any derivative works originating from ideas or opinions expressed within the contents of this website constitute prior art and are covered by the GNU GPL" (or some such, while bearing in mind that IANAL).
One of you geniuses may unknowingly and casually toss out a feasible idea. It would burn you, to see somebody turn that into a profit-making machine, wouldn't it?
lollll....you'll know when you do it, though; a squad of lawyers will show up on your doorstep with a $1 bill, a quitclaim agreement, and a host of delightful comments upon the hazards of a lifetime spent in courtrooms - particularly when considered in light of your...unfortunate...financial circumstances and how the latter affects your ability to retain good legal representation...
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
I think we can almost take it for granted that current copyright policy is damaging to our cultural development. How could it not be to have all our creative expression tied up and limited based on whether or not someone created something similar? However, whenever the whole issue gets raised, questions get quashed by talking about "the economy" and economic benefits bestowed on certain groups by copyright.
Those are certainly issues to think about. By what means would authors and songwriters make money if copyright ceased on exist, or even was much more limited? What happens to all the jobs created by the publishing industry, the music industry, and the movie industry? It's particularly a concern in the US because we don't manufacture very much anymore, and a lot of what we export are our ideas and creative works.
On the other hand, what almost no one talks about is the economic waste generated by all this. The broken window fallacy doesn't just apply to damage, but it applies to all money that need not be spent. How much money do businesses spend figuring out copyright issues, dealing with lawyers to protect copyrights or to defend against copyright lawsuits? How much more cheaply could Google do this indexing if the restrictions were eased? If movies and music and books were cheaper, then we would have the extra money in our pockets to spend on other things.
We keep hearing about how much money is "generated" by creative industries, and how big a portion of our economy they represent. The information is always offered as evidence that these industries need to be protected, because of the economic damage caused by loss of jobs and loss of profit. However, there's a flip-side to that coin. All that money they're making is coming from somewhere. I'm not claiming it's a zero-sum game because it's not that simple, but for all the billions of dollars these industries make, there's a question of how that money would be spent and where it would go if the government weren't actively protecting fat profit margins for these business models.
Here's what happens when I tried to read the article:
To continue reading this article, please register - it's quick, free and without obligation...
You have viewed your 30 days allowance of 2 free articles.
It's not "swallowing" our culture as much as fencing it off from all sorts of people.
I'm convinced, though, that the more corporations try to limit the availability of "culture" by trying to create a false scarcity, the level of productivity among local and online artists who refuse to participate will increase, and more people will turn to them for their art, music, literature, journalism, etc.
The only way to save our culture is to change the dynamic that exists between corporations and individuals. You might be surprised to learn that corporations did not always exist just to enslave the population. And I believe it will not always remain so.
My fear though is that they will try to close those "loopholes" by making it harder for individuals to distribute their own music without a "license". There could also be technical limitations placed, such as making the popular media players only play "licensed" media. I could definitely see a company like Apple or Sony making their players only play files that come from the big corporate copyright holders. Hell, that's been their plan for a long time, but the homebrew and hacker communities kept defeating them. I don't believe they're ready to give up on the "gated community" view of culture, though.
You are welcome on my lawn.
That would be the perfect opportunity for me to show up at the other side of the door with a shotgun and an attitude.
Seriously, the more unreasonable the laws become, the greater the self-justification for breaking them, whether by shotgun, or P2P digital file sharing.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Nothing short of eternal copyright and unlimited damages has any chance of satisfying the copyright cartel... and even that may not be enough as their desires are limited only by their imaginations. Like two year olds they want the moon, the stars and ... EVERYTHING. They think that they are divine.
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
Simple solution is copyrights work for ten years, plus another 10 if you have a full sized derivative work, 5 years if you make a smaller work. (The derivatives get 10 years from their own creation).
This pays the artists a fair amount of cash, keeps the publishers/distributors in business, yet allows people to do reasonable fair use.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Others have noted that the database could negatively affect some researchers for whom a book's subject matter isn't always why they read it."
This is a little vague. The purpose of one of TFAs is to show how inaccurate the metadata on books in their database can be, and how Google is unwilling to do anything about it. Thus, when researchers use Google book search to look up information about books, rather than read the book (as the summary implies), they can be mislead.
Two examples from TFA: a search for "Internet" in books published before 1950 produces 527 results, and a book entitled "Culture and Society 1780-1950" was supposedly published in 1899.
Wait until fundamentalist religious groups realize how much culture they could remove simply by buying the copyrights to those works. Once a fundamentalist Christian, Jewish, or Muslim group realizes that by investing billions of dollars they could completely control all large media, the culture war will truly begin.
The bizaro legal system is a natural consequence of our economic policy to promote IP-based economy.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
I made a really long-winded comment about it previously.
To store 720p AND 1080p copies of every movie and tv-show listed on IMDB would probably take something like 10 PB. That would likely cover dubbed soundtracks and subtitles as well.
And at Sun's prices, that'd be about 10 million dollars for a single copy (not including data center costs) stored in 21 racks.
Add in all the books ever written, music and news papers published, what are we looking at? 50 PB for a full copy? Obviously you'd need redundant storage placed on various continents, and you'd expect to replace the hardware every once in a while, but what is our entire cultural history worth to us as a civilization? A billion dollars a year? Two? Keep in mind, it shouldn't just be the US or the EU funding this, it should be everyone.
Make it a requirement for companies that if they want copyrights on their works, they have to submit it unencumbered to the storage facility. That way there can be no excuses from the companies, that they don't have $work in production any more, as it'd be easy to sell access to a particular work. And if they can't submit it for whatever reason? Copyright expires on that particular work. That'd certainly get their asses in gear to get their entire back catalogue digitized.
Unless this professor is arrested and waterboarded immediately the terrorists will win!!
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Corporations began as a means to limit risk exposure to investors in adventures in trade and, thus, encourage investment. Putting aside, for the purposes of my comment, their current morals & ethics, Corporations still function to turn a profit and limit liability for investors. The world has grown small and overcrowded and everyone wants a big piece of the pie. Urbanization can be viewed as our attempts to deal with relatively high populations and scare resources. The results are often bottlenecks that force compromise and innovation. In a small, overpopulated world wherein we can't export our surplus populations or pollution, problems become even more acute. Corporations, especially where publicly held, are double binded by being forced to maximize profits and protect their investors capital. Due diligence has become a catch phrase used throughout various subcultures, but it serves as the modern day equivalent of caveat emptor. What happens in a situation wherein there's too many players all jostling for scare resources? Double binds, or, multiple ungiving constraints appear. Government is put in place to oversee market conditions, inter alia, and, ideally find ways to ease the pressures coming from too many players and too few resources. Unfortunately when there's no room to export surplus populations and home made externalities like pollution can't be exported and impinge on neighbouring sovereign states things just get worse. Investors want a good return on their investment and a reward for saving against future contingencies, corporations are forced to protect investors' capital and return a profit, Government is saddled with playing all players off one another and borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. It's an ugly situation and IP rights and abuses are just a symptom of more systemic problems.
May you live long and prosper in interesting times. :)
ideopath @ play
I wonder if it is the case that if the USA's IP regime gets so oppressive it starts violent demonstrations, I wonder what our violent dystopian wasteland could be?
Will we have a future where the IP Exec's offices are stormed by mobs of angry young people wielding lethal force and murdering shareholders, board members and CEOs? What would such a future look like? Will we have the government executing citizens for IP related offenses? Will we go to war with countries over IP?
Kinda a scary thought.
Its the lawyers that are swallowing our culture.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Wow, copyright law really is a Black Hole!
I mean bitching at MS about IE and WMP is all well and good, but when the basic standard for proving you can operate a computer - the European Computer Driving Licence - is nothing more than a short training course in Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, it makes you wonder whose side they're on. At least call it Office skills or something. Why are we entrenching a foreign corporation on one hand and complaining about it on the other ? It qualifies you to operate a computer in the same way operating a washing machine qualifies you as an electrical engineer. You even get points for putting your name in the right place FFS.
(The tests in that zip are last years version - the new ones mean you have to use vista and Office 2007. They also dropped the Access section completely. Those files have not touched a Windows computer since I got them from the British Computer Societys web site.)
Some jokers are charging £500 for that shit (training and test). I'd get into it myself, except I would never ever feel clean again.
The Copyright and Patent laws of 1790 are, imo, is sufficient enough to "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;".
14 year copyright, with a 14 year extension, and 17 years for a patent is enough. Authors and Inventors shouldn't be allowed to rest on their laurals for the rest of their lives, but actually contribute to society, which is what the original copyright and patent laws provided for.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Act_of_1790
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_Act_of_1790
Frederic Mitterrand, the nephew of the former president, just appointed by our dumbass in chief Sarkzy, just stated that he wanted to fight "free [libre] internet fundamentalists."
I sooo wanted to cockpunch the son of a bitch. And the god damn sarkock-sucking media who didn't point out the outrageous nature of that fascist statement.
What most people are talking about when they talk about these copyright issues are the copyrighting and/or trademarking of artistic creations.
What's rarely brought up is the fact that there's a very analogous system in the world, too. For scientific creations, there's such a thing as patents. Patents are basically copyright for scientific inventions, as opposed to artistic inventions.
Now, if we compare patents to copyright, the vast disparity in protection length becomes obvious. In most countries, patents protect the exclusivity of scientific inventions for 15-25 years.
Artistic inventions are protected for *95* years. That is to say, 4-5 times longer.
Why? What makes them worth so much longer a protection than scientific inventions get?
The purpose of exclusivity expiring eventually (that is, not being forever) is to release the invented concept into the public domain so that the general public can eventually benefit from making use of the invention in whatever way society feels fit.
However, this right of the general public is by and large being denied at present when it comes to artistic inventions. Copyright terms are being extended and extended by Disney and other megacorporations because they don't want their big brands to become public property.
Imagine if Alexander Bell would have retained exclusive rights to the telephone for 95 years. The patent was issued in 1876. That means the telephone would have become public domain in 1971! The steam turbine would have become available to the general public in 1979 and barbed wire in 1982. The roller coaster and the diesel engine would have expired in 1993.
More importantly, what things would still be patented? We'd be waiting for the zipper to expire in 2012. Aerosol cans would become available in 2022, electric shavers in 2023. Radar wouldn't fall out of protection until 2030.
Imagine how much slower technology would have advanced if things like *zippers* would have to be licensed in order to be used in clothes.
Excessively long protection times directly harm the public, whether it be in the field of our scientific development or in the field of our artistic development.