No matter what word the Vatican used, this is fundamentally about trademarks, not copyrights.
Trademarks are about identity: they prevent impersonation. Identity protection is exactly the Vatican's concern here. They don't want other groups pretending to be the Catholic Church. (There remain interesting questions as to who has the right to decide what the Catholic Church is, as with any religion or other affinity group, but that's an inherent property of identity itself.)
This case is not about copyright, in any case, since copyright isn't about identity. When people illegally share music, for example, they don't remove the original artist's name and replace it with their own. Copyright is not about credit or attribution; it's about the sharing itself. That's why it's called "copyright" instead of "creditright".
Lumping these two unrelated concepts together under the term "intellectual property" just leads to confusion. And the copyright lobby is very happy to benefit from this confusion, since people have a strong moral attachment to accurate crediting. For example, see http://questioncopyright.org/promise#plagiarism-vs-copying for a blatant example of the RIAA trying to confuse copyright violation with plagiarism -- that is, confuse unauthorized sharing with identity theft.
Now, if the Vatican were claiming a monopoly right on the Bible, that would be a copyright issue. But they're not, of course, because the Bible is in the public domain everywhere.
See also the BookLiberator, a more compact design
on
The DIY Book Scanner
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
See also the BookLiberator, a somewhat more compact cube-in-cradle design, that's also easy to build. Although soon you won't have to build your own: we're prototyping a manufacturable, flat-packed kit to sell from our online store; see questioncopyright.org/bookliberator for more about the project. It should be ready next year.
None of which is to detract from Reetz's accomplishment, of course. This renaissance in personal book scanners is going to make it easier for all of them, in the long run, especially as we can share the same open source software among all the scanners.
Nothing about setting up a wiki in Drupal... The review doesn't bring it up, and as far as I can tell from the online table of contents, the book doesn't either. That was sort of surprising, for a book about community sites.
For some statistical evidence (built on a very small sample size) that code review is worth it, see this section of a chapter from O'Reilly Media's book Beautiful Teams:
That section is not about code review per se (it's about how a seemingly trivial interface decision affected code review), but it includes some code review stats from two projects, and discusses how frequently one project's code review catches mistake from previous changes.
(Disclaimer: I wrote the chapter, but it seems pertinent enough to this discussion to be worth posting.)
A lot of free software documentation is released under free licenses these days. Was this? Or maybe a non-free but still liberal license like CreativeCommons Attribution-NonCommercial or something?
(Might be good to tweak the Slashdot book review guidelines to make stating the license a standard part of these reviews...)
The author is quite right that there should be a carrying cost to copyrights and patents. But take it one step farther: Make the annual registration fee a percentage of an owner-declared total value; then give the public the option to buy out the owner by paying that total value.
For example, I declare my novel to be worth $100,000. My registration fee that year will be $2000 (I'm just using 2% as an example). But at any time during that year, anyone can come along and pay me $100,000 to liberate the work into the public domain, as a mandatory transaction. I've declared the price, so it's a fair price by definition. Each year at re-registration time, I can change that total value, moving it either up or down, to reflect changes in the market value of my work. But having done so, I'm obligated to allow liberation for the declared price at any given time.
Note that this transaction is not a sale of the copyright or patent, it's a liberation. Sales can still take place, as before, and a private sale could be for more or less than the declared public value (because the buyer might want to preserve the monopoly, rather than liberate the work). All the market dynamics that copyrights and patents formerly had, they would still have.
Laura Wingerd and Christopher Seiwald wrote an excellent chapter on this topic for O'Reilly's Beautiful Code book (just out). See Chapter 32,
"Code in Motion". The code from their chapter is online here:
http://www.perforce.com/beautifulcode/
Just scanning the paper, I found it hard to tell what goals he thought
we should be optimizing for. Production of new, original works?
Production of original and derivative works? Does the ability to copy
have a value in itself, and is that value factored into the equations?
Without a clear statement of goals, it's hard to see how these kinds
of calculations mean anything for policy.
It looked to me -- and I only scanned, so I could be mistaken -- that
he thinks we should be optimizing for "production of new works". If
so, that's a massive assumption that will affect everything about the
outcome of his calculations... yet (I would argue) it's not the right
goal.
Wish I had time to do a more thorough analysis of the paper, and perhaps a critique if my fears above were to prove correct...
Regarding: "The essence of copyright is being able to say that you are the author."
No, that's not true. The reasons it's called copyright is that it's the exclusive right to make copies. If I took a public domain work (say, the Illiad by Homer), and claimed that I wrote it, I would not be guilty of copyright violation. Nevertheless, everyone would still correctly accuse me of plagiarism.
This is why even public-domain open source software (yes, there's plenty of it) does not generally suffer from plagiarism. Crediting and copying are two different things.
It sounds like you're imagining some firm connection between an author getting credited and that author getting paid. While I'm completely in favor of both of those things, they're two different things. You can have one without the other, in either direction. This is exactly what happens with a ghostwritten book, for example: the author is paid, but not credited.
I didn't say it wasn't a crime, I said it wasn't stealing. It would be, under current law, a crime, but many things that are legal today were once crimes, and many things that are illegal today will not be crimes in the future. I'm proposing that most copying go into the latter category!:-)
I merely meant to point out that the OP argues as if control of distribution must always travel together with proper attribution, whereas in fact they're separate: we could (and should) enforce proper attribution without placing restrictions on who can copy. Furthermore, we could enforce viral sharing (like the GPL) without placing restrictions on sharing. We'd do this by placing restrictions on when someone can refuse to share instead, which is in a way the opposite of standard copyright.
I agree with you that "If I *copy* your software, remove all hints that it is yours, and sell it as my own: that's stealing.". But it's stealing because of the "remove all hints that it is yours" part, not the "copy your software" part. You put two separate actions into one sentence, as if they're one action, and then apply the label "stealing" to the combination. This is exactly what I was trying to rebut in Bulmash's post. Only one of those actions is stealing; the other one is... well, copying:-).
A lot of the responses say this same thing; I'm replying here, but this reply could apply equally well to many of the other responses.
The whole point the copyright abolitionists are trying to make is that it is not necessarily good that an author be able control the distribution and use of their work. I know that seems unbelievable, almost immoral, to many people, and yet it is how creativity was for most of human history. Open source pretty much works that way now (it's the infamous "right to fork", even against the author's wishes).
The abolitionists are perfectly aware of what copyright law *is* today, they're just trying to change that. I'm not sure why this is so hard to understand: there's a law, some people don't like it, they try to change it. That doesn't mean they don't understand the law, it means they *do* understand it but want something different.
Thanks for the plug, chainLynx. We've also got a response to Greg Bulmash up now:
"Supporting Open Source While Opposing Copyright". I don't think his argument really holds up, and the response explains why in detail.
These exchanges always go the same way: someone in the industry (an executive, a production person, an artist) says "Without these high royalty rates, I couldn't make the living I make today!" This is true, but utterly beside the point. The question is, would art and music and writing still be produced if we abandoned the centralized, monopolistic distribution mechanism that DRM and modern copyright law currently enforce? The answer is obviously "yes". And artists would still make a living, just as they always have (since copyright royalties play no significant part in the economic lives of most artists anyway, with the exception of a few stars). Giant publishing conglomerates would make a lot less money from royalties, but that's not society's problem. After all it is not the job of government to enable one particular business model at the expense of other business models.
This is asking the wrong question. "Digital" is not a medium. A CD is a medium, as is a hard disk, a tape, a memory card, etc. The important thing about digital data -- the way in which it is least like analog data -- is precisely that it can be transferred from medium to medium without degradation. Thus it doesn't matter that your hard drive will fail within ten years, because by then the data on it will be replicated in lots of places.
These days, it makes more sense to think of digital data's medium as "The Cloud". The Cloud is all those servers over at Flickr and Google and YouTube and Yahoo and Archive.org and wherever else your bits go, plus your hard drive, your USB memory stick, your camera's flash card, and a zillion other locations. Once data enters The Cloud, it never leaves. (Yes, this is an idealization, but it is becoming more true every day; it is pretty clearly where we're headed.) It doesn't matter if one individual component of The Cloud goes down; think of it like RAID-Infinity storage. The Cloud may not be more than the sum of its parts, but it has a *lot* of parts.
Will you be engaging an external development community as part of this contract? Will you be writing new code from scratch, or integrating it into an existing codebase (and if so, is that existing codebase already open source or not)?
Retaining copyright for yourself is a good idea; you can just make sure the contract grants the other party "perpetual, royalty-free, non-exclusive, irrevocable rights to use, sublicense, and distribute the software" or something like that (I am not a lawyer, though -- and you might want to take out the 'sublicense', depending on your goals, consult a lawyer about that).
"Why Does Everybody Hate Microsoft?" was the topic of a feature I wrote for Slashdot back in 1998. I'm not sure how well it holds up today (Microsoft is not exactly the same company now that it was then), but for what it's worth, here's the link:
The myth that copyright was created for the public's benefit is very persistent.
See QuestionCopyright.org for a
detailed explanation of the origin of this myth and its effects today.
Simple: patent-free, or at least patent-unencumbered. Hardware development is such a minefield of patents that no small player can seriously participate without getting big allies. Of course, there are many other reasons why small players would have a hard time, patents are only one. But they are determinant: a patent-laden "open" hardware spec is not really open. You either have freedom or you don't, the rest is mere nuance.
The Apache license itself has some interesting software patent provisions, but the apache.org web site doesn't seem to have much in the way of an official position or policy statement on software patents. Can you talk about Apache's attitude (if any) toward software patents, and maybe business method patents as well? Do any current patents interfere with the Foundation's work?
The sentence from the NYT is carefully constructed to be ambiguous. I would be shocked if Google were actually agreeing to bias its search results to favor AOL. However, favoring AOL content "throughout its [Google's] site" might just mean giving AOL content preferential treatment in sponsored links, as some other coverage has indicated, and perhaps in other places outside the search results themselves.
Of course, sponsored links can be considered a kind of search result, but since they're sponsored anyway, it's just a question of whether the buyers get what they think they paid for, and not a question of misrepresenting Internet content.
She's right about the trend, wrong that it's bad.
on
The Demise of IP?
·
· Score: 1
The author is right about what this trend implies for IP rights in general, but she's wrong that it will harm the world by removing the so-called incentives of traditional IP law. The story that really needs telling here is how copyright got started: it wasn't some starry-eyed union of writers and artists demanding "protection" for their works. It was a publishing industry initiative aimed at preserving a censorship-era monopoly on the use of the printing press. Copyright was invented to subsidize distributors, not creators, and now that distribution costs are going to zero (thanks to the Internet), copyright is becoming increasingly hard to justify.
The new site copyrightmyths.org is devoted to telling the real history of copyright, and to exploring alternatives to information monopolies. It also explodes some publishing industry myths, such as the idea that copyright is somehow about protecting authors from plagiarism (it's not). The site is managed by the Drupal CRM, so those who'd like to get involved in contributing content can do so easily. Naturally, everything on the site is under open copyright.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, that's fair -- it could go either way. That's what I get for trying to be too clever!
No matter what word the Vatican used, this is fundamentally about trademarks, not copyrights.
Trademarks are about identity: they prevent impersonation. Identity protection is exactly the Vatican's concern here. They don't want other groups pretending to be the Catholic Church. (There remain interesting questions as to who has the right to decide what the Catholic Church is, as with any religion or other affinity group, but that's an inherent property of identity itself.)
This case is not about copyright, in any case, since copyright isn't about identity. When people illegally share music, for example, they don't remove the original artist's name and replace it with their own. Copyright is not about credit or attribution; it's about the sharing itself. That's why it's called "copyright" instead of "creditright".
Lumping these two unrelated concepts together under the term "intellectual property" just leads to confusion. And the copyright lobby is very happy to benefit from this confusion, since people have a strong moral attachment to accurate crediting. For example, see http://questioncopyright.org/promise#plagiarism-vs-copying for a blatant example of the RIAA trying to confuse copyright violation with plagiarism -- that is, confuse unauthorized sharing with identity theft.
Now, if the Vatican were claiming a monopoly right on the Bible, that would be a copyright issue. But they're not, of course, because the Bible is in the public domain everywhere.
See also the BookLiberator, a somewhat more compact cube-in-cradle design, that's also easy to build. Although soon you won't have to build your own: we're prototyping a manufacturable, flat-packed kit to sell from our online store; see questioncopyright.org/bookliberator for more about the project. It should be ready next year.
None of which is to detract from Reetz's accomplishment, of course. This renaissance in personal book scanners is going to make it easier for all of them, in the long run, especially as we can share the same open source software among all the scanners.
Nothing about setting up a wiki in Drupal... The review doesn't bring it up, and as far as I can tell from the online table of contents, the book doesn't either. That was sort of surprising, for a book about community sites.
-Karl Fogel
For some statistical evidence (built on a very small sample size) that code review is worth it, see this section of a chapter from O'Reilly Media's book Beautiful Teams:
http://www.red-bean.com/kfogel/beautiful-teams/bt-chapter-21.html#gumption-sink
That section is not about code review per se (it's about how a seemingly trivial interface decision affected code review), but it includes some code review stats from two projects, and discusses how frequently one project's code review catches mistake from previous changes.
(Disclaimer: I wrote the chapter, but it seems pertinent enough to this discussion to be worth posting.)
--Karl Fogel
Andy Oram, an editor at O'Reilly, wrote this essay on Wolfram Alpha and how it fits (or doesn't fit) into the "tech-splicing" revolution:
Results from Wolfram Alpha: All the Questions We Ever Wanted to Ask About Software as a Service
(Disclaimer: Andy is my editor. But it's a good article; check it out.)
A lot of free software documentation is released under free licenses these days. Was this? Or maybe a non-free but still liberal license like CreativeCommons Attribution-NonCommercial or something?
(Might be good to tweak the Slashdot book review guidelines to make stating the license a standard part of these reviews...)
The author is quite right that there should be a carrying cost to copyrights and patents. But take it one step farther: Make the annual registration fee a percentage of an owner-declared total value; then give the public the option to buy out the owner by paying that total value.
For example, I declare my novel to be worth $100,000. My registration fee that year will be $2000 (I'm just using 2% as an example). But at any time during that year, anyone can come along and pay me $100,000 to liberate the work into the public domain, as a mandatory transaction. I've declared the price, so it's a fair price by definition. Each year at re-registration time, I can change that total value, moving it either up or down, to reflect changes in the market value of my work. But having done so, I'm obligated to allow liberation for the declared price at any given time.
Note that this transaction is not a sale of the copyright or patent, it's a liberation. Sales can still take place, as before, and a private sale could be for more or less than the declared public value (because the buyer might want to preserve the monopoly, rather than liberate the work). All the market dynamics that copyrights and patents formerly had, they would still have.
This proposal is described in more detail in http://www.questioncopyright.org/balanced_buyout/
When someone steals your bicyle, now you have no bicycle.
When someone copies your song, now you both have it.
That's a pretty important difference!
http://questioncopyright.org/
Laura Wingerd and Christopher Seiwald wrote an excellent chapter on this topic for O'Reilly's Beautiful Code book (just out). See Chapter 32, "Code in Motion". The code from their chapter is online here: http://www.perforce.com/beautifulcode/
On a discussion list at http://questioncopyright.org/, I wrote this in response to this paper:
Just scanning the paper, I found it hard to tell what goals he thought
we should be optimizing for. Production of new, original works?
Production of original and derivative works? Does the ability to copy
have a value in itself, and is that value factored into the equations?
Without a clear statement of goals, it's hard to see how these kinds
of calculations mean anything for policy.
It looked to me -- and I only scanned, so I could be mistaken -- that
he thinks we should be optimizing for "production of new works". If
so, that's a massive assumption that will affect everything about the
outcome of his calculations... yet (I would argue) it's not the right
goal.
Wish I had time to do a more thorough analysis of the paper, and perhaps a critique if my fears above were to prove correct...
-Karl Fogel
Regarding: "The essence of copyright is being able to say that you are the author."
No, that's not true. The reasons it's called copyright is that it's the exclusive right to make copies. If I took a public domain work (say, the Illiad by Homer), and claimed that I wrote it, I would not be guilty of copyright violation. Nevertheless, everyone would still correctly accuse me of plagiarism.
This is why even public-domain open source software (yes, there's plenty of it) does not generally suffer from plagiarism. Crediting and copying are two different things.
It sounds like you're imagining some firm connection between an author getting credited and that author getting paid. While I'm completely in favor of both of those things, they're two different things. You can have one without the other, in either direction. This is exactly what happens with a ghostwritten book, for example: the author is paid, but not credited.
I didn't say it wasn't a crime, I said it wasn't stealing. It would be, under current law, a crime, but many things that are legal today were once crimes, and many things that are illegal today will not be crimes in the future. I'm proposing that most copying go into the latter category! :-)
I merely meant to point out that the OP argues as if control of distribution must always travel together with proper attribution, whereas in fact they're separate: we could (and should) enforce proper attribution without placing restrictions on who can copy. Furthermore, we could enforce viral sharing (like the GPL) without placing restrictions on sharing. We'd do this by placing restrictions on when someone can refuse to share instead, which is in a way the opposite of standard copyright.
:-).
I agree with you that "If I *copy* your software, remove all hints that it is yours, and sell it as my own: that's stealing.". But it's stealing because of the "remove all hints that it is yours" part, not the "copy your software" part. You put two separate actions into one sentence, as if they're one action, and then apply the label "stealing" to the combination. This is exactly what I was trying to rebut in Bulmash's post. Only one of those actions is stealing; the other one is... well, copying
Best,
-Karl
A lot of the responses say this same thing; I'm replying here, but this reply could apply equally well to many of the other responses.
The whole point the copyright abolitionists are trying to make is that it is not necessarily good that an author be able control the distribution and use of their work. I know that seems unbelievable, almost immoral, to many people, and yet it is how creativity was for most of human history. Open source pretty much works that way now (it's the infamous "right to fork", even against the author's wishes).
The abolitionists are perfectly aware of what copyright law *is* today, they're just trying to change that. I'm not sure why this is so hard to understand: there's a law, some people don't like it, they try to change it. That doesn't mean they don't understand the law, it means they *do* understand it but want something different.
Thanks for the plug, chainLynx. We've also got a response to Greg Bulmash up now: "Supporting Open Source While Opposing Copyright". I don't think his argument really holds up, and the response explains why in detail.
These exchanges always go the same way: someone in the industry (an executive, a production person, an artist) says "Without these high royalty rates, I couldn't make the living I make today!" This is true, but utterly beside the point. The question is, would art and music and writing still be produced if we abandoned the centralized, monopolistic distribution mechanism that DRM and modern copyright law currently enforce? The answer is obviously "yes". And artists would still make a living, just as they always have (since copyright royalties play no significant part in the economic lives of most artists anyway, with the exception of a few stars). Giant publishing conglomerates would make a lot less money from royalties, but that's not society's problem. After all it is not the job of government to enable one particular business model at the expense of other business models.
Spread the word: http://www.questioncopyright.org/
This is asking the wrong question. "Digital" is not a medium. A CD is a medium, as is a hard disk, a tape, a memory card, etc. The important thing about digital data -- the way in which it is least like analog data -- is precisely that it can be transferred from medium to medium without degradation. Thus it doesn't matter that your hard drive will fail within ten years, because by then the data on it will be replicated in lots of places.
These days, it makes more sense to think of digital data's medium as "The Cloud". The Cloud is all those servers over at Flickr and Google and YouTube and Yahoo and Archive.org and wherever else your bits go, plus your hard drive, your USB memory stick, your camera's flash card, and a zillion other locations. Once data enters The Cloud, it never leaves. (Yes, this is an idealization, but it is becoming more true every day; it is pretty clearly where we're headed.) It doesn't matter if one individual component of The Cloud goes down; think of it like RAID-Infinity storage. The Cloud may not be more than the sum of its parts, but it has a *lot* of parts.
Will you be engaging an external development community as part of this contract? Will you be writing new code from scratch, or integrating it into an existing codebase (and if so, is that existing codebase already open source or not)?
m l
Retaining copyright for yourself is a good idea; you can just make sure the contract grants the other party "perpetual, royalty-free, non-exclusive, irrevocable rights to use, sublicense, and distribute the software" or something like that (I am not a lawyer, though -- and you might want to take out the 'sublicense', depending on your goals, consult a lawyer about that).
I wrote a little bit about this process in
http://producingoss.com/html-chunk/contracting.ht
by the way.
Good luck,
-Karl
"Why Does Everybody Hate Microsoft?" was the topic of a feature
/ 25/110300
I wrote for Slashdot back in 1998. I'm not sure how well it holds
up today (Microsoft is not exactly the same company now that it was
then), but for what it's worth, here's the link:
http://features.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=98/03
Enjoy,
-Karl Fogel
The myth that copyright was created for the public's benefit is very persistent. See QuestionCopyright.org for a detailed explanation of the origin of this myth and its effects today.
What does 'open' mean in hardware?
Simple: patent-free, or at least patent-unencumbered. Hardware development is
such a minefield of patents that no small player can seriously participate
without getting big allies. Of course, there are many other reasons why
small players would have a hard time, patents are only one. But they are
determinant: a patent-laden "open" hardware spec is not really open. You
either have freedom or you don't, the rest is mere nuance.
The Apache license itself has some interesting software patent provisions, but the apache.org web site doesn't seem to have much in the way of an official position or policy statement on software patents. Can you talk about Apache's attitude (if any) toward software patents, and maybe business method patents as well? Do any current patents interfere with the Foundation's work?
Yo,
-Karl
Not so fast...
The sentence from the NYT is carefully constructed to be ambiguous. I would be shocked if Google were actually agreeing to bias its search results to favor AOL. However, favoring AOL content "throughout its [Google's] site" might just mean giving AOL content preferential treatment in sponsored links, as some other coverage has indicated, and perhaps in other places outside the search results themselves.
Of course, sponsored links can be considered a kind of search result, but since they're sponsored anyway, it's just a question of whether the buyers get what they think they paid for, and not a question of misrepresenting Internet content.
The author is right about what this trend implies for IP rights in general, but she's wrong that it will harm the world by removing the so-called incentives of traditional IP law. The story that really needs telling here is how copyright got started: it wasn't some starry-eyed union of writers and artists demanding "protection" for their works. It was a publishing industry initiative aimed at preserving a censorship-era monopoly on the use of the printing press. Copyright was invented to subsidize distributors, not creators, and now that distribution costs are going to zero (thanks to the Internet), copyright is becoming increasingly hard to justify.
The new site copyrightmyths.org is devoted to telling the real history of copyright, and to exploring alternatives to information monopolies. It also explodes some publishing industry myths, such as the idea that copyright is somehow about protecting authors from plagiarism (it's not). The site is managed by the Drupal CRM, so those who'd like to get involved in contributing content can do so easily. Naturally, everything on the site is under open copyright.