Copyright on Port 80: Shoreline: issues

You raise up your head
And you ask, "Is this where it is?"
And somebody points to you and says
"It's his"
And you say, "What's mine?"
And somebody else says, "Where what is?"
And you say, "Oh my God
Am I here all alone?"

Because something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

-- Bob Dylan, Ballad of a Thin Man, 1965

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possess the whole of it.

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lites his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement, or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
-- Thomas Jefferson

There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest.

This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit.
-- Robert Heinlein, Life-Line

copyright history, especially the late date at which music and other forms of IP got included; why some forms of IP aren't included; influence of Mickey Mouse

The Problem

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

The problem is not with the rights. Attribution is very important. I've not heard any arguments that says it should be okay for me to put my name on Shakespeare's works and then attempt to collect royalties from every college production of Hamlet.

Examples

You put your name on someone else's writing, print it out, and hand it in as your own, hoping the boss or teacher won't notice.

You put your name on someone else's Web page, carefully take out every indication in the code that someone else had anything to do with it. You then post the page to your Web site and take credit for it.

In addition to being wrong and unethical, it's also foolish because it's too easy for the original author to find you through a search engine.

The problem is with the copy

Copyright law is based on a world of "real" property made out of atoms that can be owned and sold but can only be in one place at a time. Copyright law assumes scarcity. There are only so many copies, a quantity. The first copyright laws in Europe go back only five hundred years.

Information stored in bits doesn't exist in the same sense. It is not scarce. It's on its way to being everywhere all the time. It is thus becoming almost "valueless" in the traditional sense of value because it will be of no value to me to have it if you have it, too.

The traditional value to me is in your not having it. In addition, of course, you must be willing to pay me for it or for what it empowers me to do that you can't. My maternal grandmother's secret bread recipe died with her. Coca-Cola has built a very valuable business on a secret beverage recipe. To the extent that the Internet spreads, there will be no more secrets in that sense.

It will turn out that Coca-Cola's real advantage (just like my grandmother's) is in the marketing department. To preserve shareholder value, it had better turn out that way because they've outsourced everything else, specifically production and distribution.

Do the old copyright laws still apply?

How should we encourage / reward people for producing intellectual property like songs, music, novels, poems, and web pages? Should we encourage them at all? Why is the government involved at all?

Throughout human history, almost all intellectual expression was "given away" or sold for a pittance. Laws allowing private ownership of property have depended on individual or legal force, often violent. A thief gets his hand cut off.

Laws allowing private ownership of intellectual property are only a couple of hundred years old. They are designed to be temporary; the law puts everything in public domain unless specifically and temporarily exempted.

In the old days, copyright was a simple matter. Before the Information Age, there was no real distinction between information and its physical form -- a copy, say, of a book. Copyright is a relatively enforceable proposition when you're talking about physical stuff. It's difficult to make good, physical duplicates, so copyright owners have a chance of detecting counterfeits, tracking down the copiers, proving that their rights were infringed, and stopping the copying. By the same token, physical copies have actual value, in proportion to their scarcity.

But here's the Internet, which at a very fundamental level is all about copying. ... Because of that, there's probably no way to enforce digital copyright.

Look at the absurdities

We live in an Information Age, yet the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles don't account for the knowledge of an organization even though it is often the sole sustainable competitive advantage in a quagmire of inefficiency. Laying off human beings who carry this knowledge may be exactly the wrong strategy, yet the bean counters insist.

The Internet is by far the largest systematic violation of copyright law. Copyright violation is built into the very nature of the Internet. For example, a copy of every Web page and every image you see is on your PC in your browser cache. Unless you specifically delete it, it stays there for months if not longer.

In practical terms, it means if your kid downloads Gnutella and uses it to collect MP3s, your kid could wind up living most of his life among the mother-stabbers and father-rapers in our Federal prison system. (Maybe we'll have to toss a few of these worthies outside to make room for your little baby. But anything to protect copyright.)

Imagine what could happen to democracy if the courts kill off this popular software. ...

If we make Napster-like free file sharing illegal, we'll have to rid ourselves of either computers or democracy. You can't have both. And the issues raised by Napster aren't going away. They are going to rise up again and again until our society makes some difficult decisions and adjustments.

As a computer scientist, I see only too clearly that no matter how much money litigants spend in attempts to stop file sharing, the practice will go on anyway. As a citizen, I fear the threat to democracy implicit in my thought experiment, particularly because I suspect people might allow this threat to come to fruition before they understand the circumstances and long-term effects. The sane solution is not to waste all our energies fighting pointless battles in court but to seek out creative means of compensating musicians — and the technicians and businesspeople who make it possible for them to create their songs.

As a musician, I have come to believe that free file sharing is good for the soul. In the short run, we may lose money. But we are a tenacious lot, and we will figure out new ways to make money in cyberspace. If we believe in the future of music — and I don't mean remarketing rock 'n' roll to each new generation but rather encouraging unbounded creative exploration — then we should celebrate the open Internet.

(my emphasis)

All the software you need to burn your own DVD Video, is included in our software package 321Studio! With detailed, easy to follow, step-by-step instructions, you can BURN your own DVD Video using nothing more than our interactive software application and your CD-R.

The website for those who want more from their DVD's. Learn to copy your DVD's with speed, quality and ease.....

Networks say watching TV without the ads is theft. ...

Turner Broadcasting System CEO Jaimie Kellner asserted that television viewers who skipped commercials using their digital video recorders were guilty of "stealing" broadcast content. ...

A range of new media technologies ... have helped to expand the range of entertainment options available to consumers and thus dramatically decrease the ratings shares of the major networks.

As a consequence, the various ways networks measure their viewership -- and make commitments to advertisers -- are increasingly losing their credibility. The Nielsen Ratings have long been discredited as having little or no social science validity, measuring, by design, only those consumers who are desired by the advertisers themselves. Most of us frankly don't count when it comes time to decide which series should be renewed.

These new media technologies, which allow us to mute or fast-forward through advertisements, call into question the concept of the "impression," the basic unit upon which advertising buys get made. In the old model, the number of people who were watching the program were assumed to be roughly the number of people who were being accessed by the advertisers.

Those of us who grew up in a television culture know that this was probably never true, but it kept the accounting simple for those in the business of buying and selling spots. Consequently, despite a succession of significant shifts in broadcast technologies and consumer behavior, the same basic vocabulary dominated commercial negotiations for decades. Today, those negotiations are reaching a crisis point. The networks are responding not by rethinking how they do business, not by developing new metrics for measuring and accurately reporting viewer interactions with media content, not by adopting new marketing strategies which take advantage of the affordments of the new media environment, but by wagging a finger at consumers and demanding that we behave according to their antiquated dictates.

Why video games need the protection of the First Amendment. ...

It is at such moments of transition that First-Amendment constitutional protections are most urgently required. Regulatory solutions to media violence discourage innovation. In times when censorship pressures mount, the game industry is apt to become more timid, fall back on old formulas, imitate past successes.

The Big Myth of Copyright

Well, music has been copyrightable in this country for less than two hundred years. The body of human music before then is somewhat large and of high quality. If indeed it is true that "People won't make music if they don't get paid", then why is there so much good music the precedes any copyright law?

Not only was all this music unprotected, until about five hundred years ago, it was completely anonymous. Now it's almost completely anonymous except for a few highly visible brands such as Britney Spears and Beethoven, one of whom is dead. The brand doesn't have much to do with the human being. Human beings collect very few royalties; corporations do, specifically, the record companies. As Britney grows up, she'll probably find that the Britney Spears brand is a nuisance if not an albatross. The story of Beethoven's struggles to make even a meager living from his music are legendary. In fact, it's where we get the cliché of the starving artist in the garret (attic).

To rephrase: Large corporations that distribute CDs won't continue distributing CDs if they don't get paid.

Now, that is true. Next question: so what? What does that have to do with copyright? Do we owe the buggy whip industry a market after we're all buying cars? Do we owe the railroad industry a profit after everything ships by 18-wheeler? I don't think so. Some dinosaurs grew wings and survive to this day. The rest hid behind "copyright" smokescreens while they waddled to the tar pits where they turned into fossils.

The problem | How can there be property rights in bits on a ubiquitous, distributed network?

What's the problem underneath the problem?

Competition. Squawks about copyright are a smokescreen. To hide behind copyright law is at best a temporary rear-guard action to preserve shareholder value in the short term. For many companies, it also preserves a business model that they don't have the courage or leadership skills to change.

What industry is next? What about banking? Book publishing? Textbook publishing?

Definitions

patents

intellectual property

peer-to-peer networks

Established facts

Latest News

There's more free downloading of music than ever. The big labels hate it -- but shutting down the outlaw networks won't be so easy this time.

To the big record labels, Napster wasn't just a nuisance; it was their worst nightmare .... So when an appeals court issued an order last July forcing Napster to shut down, there was a sigh of relief throughout the recording industry. It was the day free music died.

Or so it seemed. Napster as we knew it is gone. But what's taken its place is a lot scarier for the music industry--and perhaps unstoppable. They're called file-sharing services, or P2P networks in geek-speak, and the three most popular ones--Kazaa, Grokster, and Morpheus--have a combined 70 million active users, compared with only 20 million for Napster in its heyday. Oh, and it's not just music being zapped across the Internet anymore. The new Napsters house videogames, software programs, and movies, including ones now playing in theaters. ...

Like Kazaa, Grokster and Morpheus also grew by themselves. None of the networks has ever done a stitch of marketing to lure users. Digital-music fans go wherever there's software that lets them get their MP3 files. Short of suing 70 million-plus people or encrypting every CD and DVD sold (an unlikely scenario), it's hard to imagine how to stop it.

Still, the music industry has to try.

Every time some new technology has expanded free access to popular music, starting with radio broadcasts of recorded songs in the 1930s, the recording industry has fought it - claiming that it would cost them money. And every time, it has resulted in increased sales. ...

The music industry is well aware of this effect - and they are not really aiming to stop the private exchange of songs in MP3 format. If that were their goal, they'd be instituting widespread, aggressive legal actions against all the server-centered nodes (as they did against all radio stations playing their music in the 30s, when they really thought the phenomenon was going to wipe them out). Instead, they have focused on the best-known services - first Napster, then Morpheus, KaZaA, and most recently, Audiogalaxy. Even in those cases, they've limited their legal challenges to things they know they can win - and they've avoided actual court trials whenever possible (to avoid the possibility of setting some damaging precedent).

The point that seems to escape a lot of people is that copyright is not a property in the same sense as most of the things we think of as property. One key difference is that if you don't defend it, you lose it. If you left your car sitting in the driveway, with the window open and the keys in the ignition, and somebody drove away in it, that would still be theft - and you'd still be entitled to get your car back. Not so with copyright. ... But if they DON'T defend it, someone at some point could start using the word on their own product, arguing that it is in the public domain.

The efforts of the music industry are not aimed at actually stopping the exchange of music between individuals - which they know from long experience, increases their sales because most of the people who normally buy the music aren't really satisfied with near-perfect copies. For most of them, the learning curve and the cost in time of creating those copies themselves outweighs the cost of simply buying the CD. Most of the outright piracy is committed by people who wouldn't have bought the music in the first place. What the music industry is doing is clearly aimed at establishing a public record of their efforts to defend copyright, in the broadest, most public way; to prevent anyone from making a legal claim that the stuff they own has entered the public domain. The thing they're really worried about, in terms of profits, is the change in the marketing model. Even legitimate online music commerce threatens the album format, with its traditional mix of a few good songs and a bunch of others most people wouldn't pay for if they were buying the stuff song by song. The problem is how to make as much money on a per-song basis - and, at the moment, it requires charging far more for an individual song that most people are willing to pay.

At any rate, copyright is actually a fairly complex matter of civil law, with a good deal of history behind it - dating back to the Renaissance. The strategies music companies use are clearly directed to realities and necessities, in light of history and case law. They have also done a great PR job, convincing the most technically knowledgeable people on the Internet that it is a simple moral or criminal issue. "Common sense" tells a lot of people that copying music without paying for it is just like stealing someone's car, and represents a loss to the owner. But if common sense could decide the issue equitably, we wouldn't have the law in the first place. Most of our great intellectual systems, including not only law but science, are designed in large part to overcome the errors of common sense, and that is more the case in civil law than criminal. The people who work within those systems are well aware of that, but they are also well aware that most people aren't - and that it can work to their advantage. Any time a highly paid civil attorney begins by telling you that an issue vital to his client is actually very simple, or just a matter of common sense, there's a very high probability that what he means is that it's to his clients advantage if people like you believe that. If it really WERE that simple, the client wouldn't be paying him as much as he is.

The theory was that as an incentive for people to develop what the Constitution calls "useful arts," creators should enjoy rights to the fruits of their work for an unspecified amount of time, but not indefinitely.

"We give people effective monopolies in order to promote people creating, but the bargain is they have to give it back," said David Opderbeck, an intellectual property lawyer in New Jersey.

Once a copyright has expired, a work is in the public domain and can be built upon, which can extend innovation and creativity, say opponents of the law.

"Think about Grimm's fairy tales," said Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford University law professor who is the lead attorney for the groups challenging the law. "The original was violent and dark, but it was in the public domain and Disney has made them palatable and nice. . . . This case is important so that the next Walt Disney can do to Disney what Disney did to Grimm's fairy tales."

Lessig said the issue was less critical before the digital age, when large companies controlled most distribution of creative works. Companies also have means, such as the use of trademark, to protect how a creation might be used or altered even after its copyright expires.

But the presence of the Internet makes every consumer a potential publisher, with the ability to distribute millions of copies of a work at the press of a button on his or her home computer. The Internet also enables millions of works to be archived and to be read or downloaded simultaneously.

Extension of copyright, opponents of the law argue, stunts the growth of the Internet by delaying availability of hundreds of books, movies and songs that could drive more demand for Internet content and services.

Case studies

Just as publishers feared circulating libraries and Hollywood feared video rental outlets, today's producers of digital content fear that the Internet will dilute the value of their intellectual property. Perhaps some dilution will occur, but the historical record seems to suggest that the expansion of the market may well outweigh the impact of this dilution.

Indeed we see this happening currently in the recorded music market. The availability of MP3 music files on the Internet at sites like www.mp3.com has inspired fear and loathing in the music industry. Their initial impulse was to suppress it via legal action. Their next impulse was to control it, via alternative licensing and copy-protection schemes. Both initiatives appear to have failed.

At this point the industry is asking, with considerable trepidation: "How can we make money out of it?" The history of rental books and rental videos suggests that there is probably a business model for very low-cost music distributed over the Internet, just as there was for low-cost books and videos.

The Issues

Who are the players?

Digital Rights Management

The analog world of CDs is a world of scarce resources. The digital world of MP3s in a world of abundant resources. DRM attempts to create artificial scarcities in order to preserve old business models.

Previously, Digital Rights Management (DRM) focused on security and encryption as a means of solving the issue of unauthorized copying, that is, lock the content and limit its distribution to only those who pay. This was the first-generation of DRM, and it represented a substantial narrowing of the real and broader capabilities of DRM. The second-generation of DRM covers the description, identification, trading, protection, monitoring and tracking of all forms of rights usages over both tangible and intangible assets including management of rights holders relationships. Additionally, it is important to note that DRM is the "digital management of rights" and not the "management of digital rights". That is, DRM manages all rights, not only the rights applicable to permissions over digital content.

> Consumer attitudes about content and DRM
> DRM technology platforms
> Digital media players and devices
> Media value chains
> Video DRM
> Music DRM
> E-Books and Magazines DRM
> Enterprise content controls
> DRM and privacy

What are the prominent issue statements?

Any issue as broad as copyright is made up of sub-issues and underlying issues and larger issues.

Educators should be aware of a brewing controversy that soon could limit how they are allowed to connect students to news articles and other copyrighted materials over the internet: Some online publishers, angry about the practice of “deep-linking” to their web sites, have begun threatening legal action against users of the tactic, calling it a violation of U.S. copyright law.

What are the prominent positions?

Excerpt, summarize, and link to the partisan advocacy positions on copyright taken on copyright by the players.

The Policies

Examples of publicly posted copyright policies

Citations for articles about copyright policies

Force Analysis

How is copyright affected by the driving and restraining forces of the Internet?

driving forces

small, fast, cheap

visual: multimedia

networked: big pipes

embedded: almost invisible

universal: everyone has them; international

ubiquitous: always on, everywhere

intelligent

easy to use

trusted

standardized

restraining forces

what's next?

In walks docster

Imagine all the researchers you know with a new bibliographic management tool that combined file storage with a Napster-like communications protocol -- docster. Instead of just citations, docster also stores the files themselves and retains a connection between the citation metadata and each corresponding file. Somewhere in the ether is a docster server to which those researchers connect. They're reading one of their articles, and they find a new reference they want to pull up. What to do? Just query docster for it. Docster will figure out who else among those connected has a copy of that article and, if it's found, requests and saves a copy for our friendly researcher.

Of course, we cannot do this. Libraries depend too much on copyright to attack the system so directly.

Peer to peer

KaZaA

Uprizer

Entropia, Popular Power and United Devices are building distributed computing services,

A Web publishing system that is highly resistant to censorship and provides publishers with a high degree of anonymity.

A system for distributed, anonymous, persistent data storage which is robust against attempts by powerful adversaries to find and destroy any stored data.

what do you think?

What's the copyright status of the content on Ricci Street? You'll find it on Ricci Green in the Principles section under Realities.

A lot of people are excited about the SSSCA, a bill being put forward by a couple of U.S. senators on behalf of large corporate backers in the software and music industry, which would make it a crime (not just an actionable civil matter) for end users to copy certain kinds of information on their computers, or even attempt to read or play it, if the copyright holder didn't want it used that way. In company with the DMCA, this bill could conceivably make it illegal even to use software that COULD be used to accomplish that purpose (including open-source OS's, such as Linux).

If this bill were to be signed into law, it would represent the first such restriction on the individual use of intellectual property (at least in a Western democracy) since the Middle Ages. The medieval church, which was the primary institution of its day, comparable to the large corporations of the industrial era in its ability to influence or even dictate the policies of governments, controlled what was read and who got to read it. All books were held in church libraries and copied only by monks, and it was necessary to take religious orders even to learn how to read. We call it the Dark Ages. Fortunately, culture was being kept alive by the Moslems.

Those in the Holy Land kept having to fend off attacks by ignorant, religion-crazed terrorists from Europe, called Crusaders, who believed that butchering infidels indiscriminately would secure them a place in heaven. The invention of moveable type made it possible for writers and readers to bypass the church's control of information, and communicate with one another directly, which made it worthwhile for ordinary people to learn to read, and sparked the Renaissance. Ordinary people began reading the Bible for themselves for the first time, which sparked the Reformation.

The SSSCA (along with other measures being put forward by the people who now interdict the flow of information, for reasons of profit rather than religion) is almost certainly unconstitutional, and unlikely to become law. Although the current atmosphere, thanks to the destruction of the WTC, increases the odds a bit. My guess is that it represents a testing of the waters, to see just what degree of control the market will accept - and also a smokescreen, to divert the attention of those most concerned while less dramatic (but more pragmatically effective) measures slide through unnoticed, attached to bills ostensibly for other purposes. That's how things have been done for a long time now.

The biggest ally the RIAA and other such information middlemen have, however, is not their influence in government, but the degree to which people on the Internet - precisely the people who ought to know better - are willing to accept what these organizations tell them about copyright law and the ownership of information without looking into it themselves. It seems intuitively reasonable to most people that information property should be treated like any other sort of property, and that those who hold "title" to it (in the form of copyright) enjoy the same kind of absolute property rights they do to, say, their cars. But that's not true, never has been, and in fact is counter to the whole point of copyright law (if it weren't, copyright law wouldn't be needed).

If you leave your car in the driveway, with the windows down and the keys in the ignition, and someone drives it away, that's still theft. You're entitled to get the car back, and the other person can go to jail. Not so with copyrighted property. The burden is on the owner of the copyright to defend it. If he doesn't, it goes into the public domain (and it stays there forever). There is no way to recapture copyright to public domain works. If a big company issues a CD of ragtime-era music, the music on that CD doesn't somehow, magically, become the property of that company. If it did, I could reprint all of the novels of Dickens and Twain and claim copyright.

Copyright is a concept of the industrial era. It arose late in the 19th century, after the book publishers that evolved earlier in the century had established the basic industrial model that people now take for granted - large-scale packagers, distributors and merchandisers purchase copyright from those who create information, and resell it to the mass market of consumers, controlling the creator's access to his audience, determining what works will be available to the market (usually for purely economic reasons), and dictating prices at both ends of the chain. Like moveable type in the late Middle Ages, the Internet has introduced a way for the creators and end users of information to bypass that control and deal directly with one another.

Copyright did not come into being as a way of protecting inherent property rights. Quite the contrary. Since the Renaissance, the "natural" condition of information is that it belongs to society at large. Even under copyright law, it is not the work itself that is owned - even by its creator - but the right to make copies of it. Copyright law came into being to allow creators of information to support themselves in an industrial economy by exercising limited, temporary, property-like rights with respect to what they created. It has failed miserably in that purpose, by the way. Most creators of information still cannot support themselves by that alone. Only about 5 percent of PUBLISHED novelists make enough from that alone to support themselves - not get rich, just support themselves. The numbers in the music industry are comparable. Those people who now say that "information wants to be free" are not spouting New Age mysticism. They are citing solid western legal and cultural traditions going all the way back to the Renaissance. A society requires a free flow of information to survive and advance. Cut it off and you get the Dark Ages - or the Soviet Union - a stagnant society spiraling into ignorance and poverty.

The members of the RIAA (to use a prominent example) are attempting to create the impression that they own all music - and at the same time attempting to create technology that makes that a de facto truth, and to pass laws enforcing it. The truth is, however, that the members of the RIAA (like other such entities) only own the copyright to a small minority of all musical works in existence or coming into existence. The vast majority of recorded music is either in the public domain, or the copyright is still held by the creator. Its members have commercial value in the mass market. Not the best ones, in any sense. The ones it thinks it can sell the most copies of, given the marketing structure it employs.

Make no mistake. There is a war being waged by the existing information industries, and it has nothing to do with the actual principles of copyright law, the rights of the creators of information, or anything of that sort. It has to do with the death of the mass market - the existence of large corporations who make their money by controlling the availability of what is available to consumers, and who rely on being able to sell the works they select in large quantities, and in the ways most profitable to them. The book publishing industry relies on the kind of mass- market demand generated by national best-seller lists, and is tightly linked to the film industry.

The big music companies make most of their money by selling songs nobody wants - the other songs on the album, apart from the two or three you really want. They are currently trying to give the appearance of wanting to participate in creating some sort of "legal Napster," but the truth is they only want to destroy that kind of market if they can, because it would inevitably mean great losses of profit. Is there any model that would induce you to pay the same amount for downloading the two or three songs you want, that you would pay in a store for the entire CD?

There is a widespread, mistaken presumption that stronger "digital rights management," the kind sought by the various information industries, also protects the interests of the creators of the works. It doesn't. I'm a published novelist, and all my personal income over the last decade has come from the copyrights I own, and I consider myself very lucky to be living in a time when I have the means to bypass the big publishers and deal directly with my readers. Without the middlemen, I can sell a book for half the price and make twice the money - but the truth is, I'd be happy to give my work away if I knew it was going to the people who really want it and appreciate it, and that was the only way I could get it to them.

We don't need these big corporations between us anymore - and they know it, and are doing everything they can think of to defend themselves, including attempting to criminalize the use of other models for the dissemination of information. A number of well- known recording artists and groups are actually opposing the RIAA, in its lawsuits against online organizations, by filing amicus briefs. That's because most serious writers, artists and - I assume - programmers are not doing it primarily to make a living or to get rich. It's nice if that happens, but there are lots of easier ways to make money, if that's all it's about. We do it because it's what we do, and the real payoff is getting it to the audience that wants it and needs it.

How many people who have worked for months, or years, to perfect a piece of software that works exactly the way they want it to, and that is unique, would sell it, for a million dollars, to someone who intends to destroy all copies and make sure that nobody else ever sees it or hears of it? Some, probably, but not many. And not the best. Would Chris take a million dollars to wipe Lockergnome off the face of the earth and agree never to create anything like it again? I doubt it. The people who run the information industries would pay the million - in a minute - if they thought it would somehow increase the bottom line. Their interests and ours are not the same.

It seems only natural that in the U.S. we'd seek protection for our creations, right? Well Samuel Slater's Clue warns us about the limits of patent and copyright protection.

What will the fear of Big Brother, combined with the fear of crooks and pedophiles, mean for Internet commerce? Life online is about to get a lot more dangerous in the name of the law. ...

We've declared common actions illegal, we're beginning to use very intrusive means to enforce those edicts, and users are being told in no uncertain terms that they have neither freedom nor privacy online.

Senators, lawyers, music-makers, Webcasters. They're deciding the future of music on the 'net. But is it the future we really want?

The Public Library of Science distributed an electronic open letter urging scientific publishers to hand over all research articles from their journals to public online archives for free within six months of publication. To add weight to their demands, the authors threatened a boycott starting in September 2001, pledging to "publish in, edit or review for, and personally subscribe to, only those scholarly and scientific journals" that agreed. As of April 21, some 15,817 life scientists from 138 countries had signed the letter, among them several Nobel laureates.

The debate over whether a free online repository of the primary scientific literature is a desirable goal, and what form such a repository should take, has recently gathered significant momentum. Gaining particular press of late has been the publication of an open letter from a newly formed advocacy group, the The Public Library of Science -- a letter that many have interpreted as a call for a boycott against publishers who opt out of making research papers available on the U.S. government's biomedical archive, PubMed Central.

We believe that the permanent, archival record of scientific research and ideas should neither be owned nor controlled by publishers, but should belong to the public, and should be made freely available.

We support the establishment of international online public libraries of science that contain the complete text of all published scientific articles in searchable and interlinked formats.

Many journal publishers appear to believe that the purpose of scientific literature is to enable them to publish journals so as to collect subscriptions from scientists and students. Such thinking is known as ‘confusion of the means with the ends’.

Their approach has been to restrict access even to read the scientific literature to those who can and will pay for it. They use copyright law, which is still in force despite its inappropriateness for computer networks, as an excuse to stop scientists from choosing new rules.

For the sake of scientific cooperation and humanity’s future, we must reject that approach at its root — not merely the obstructive systems that have been instituted, but the mistaken priorities that inspired them. ...

The US Constitution says that copyright exists "to promote the progress of science". When copyright impedes the progress of science, science must push copyright out of the way.

First Monday articles

I have a two-year old at home, and he has been teaching me to think about property rights from a different perspective. When my son wants to eat an apple, he says "I want my apple." When he wants an apple so that he can throw it on the floor, he says, "I want my apple." When he wants the apple that I'm eating, he says "I want my apple." When he wants the apple some stranger is eating, he says "I want my apple." He didn't make the apple, or grow the apple, or even buy the apple, but he wants the apple, and that makes it his apple. And, when he doesn't get "his" apple, he can get pretty upset - he's two years old, after all. So, when it isn't really inconvenient, I am probably more likely to give him an apple than to explain why it really isn't his apple at all. In the short term, that buys me a large hunk of peace, but it isn't really a viable long-term strategy: last week, we were walking down the street when he saw somebody's brand new, shiny, red Toyota parked at the curb and insisted "I want my car!"

The copyright owner groups lined up in support of the White Paper proposal to make the Internet safe for current copyright owners have been reminding me of my son, lately. There's this Internet out there, and it's scary, because it threatens them with loss of control over their products. And, because they're frightened, they want a lot of reassurance in the form of new rights to control other people's uses of their works, and their strategy for getting them is to insist that they are, already, their rights. It's a lot of trouble to explain and explain and explain that the rights they want are not and have never been their rights. It's a whole lot of trouble to be on the receiving end of the kinds of tantrums they can throw: they can send menacing letters from lawyers; they can threaten to drag folks into court. But, if every time they insist that some legal right they'd like to have is "their" property already, we just hand it over, then we shouldn't really be too surprised if they act like two-year olds every time they want something that they aren't entitled to.

Why Copyright Will Be Hard to Enforce in the Future

First, enforcing copyright laws is made easier when the creation and distribution of high-quality copies of information is relatively expensive and cumbersome. A plant that presses out pirated CDs and a network of trucks and salesmen that distribute them is relatively difficult to hide. Once found, there is no doubt in anyone's mind that the pirates were doing something illegal. Finally, the loss of the expensive equipment and the destruction of the distribution network probably represents a real benefit for the copyright holders, by eliminating a noticeable fraction of the total pirated CD output.

Technology is moving to change all that. Perfect digital copies don't degrade over time, and they take relatively inexpensive equipment to use. A distribution network is already available, in a simple form, today - the Internet. Between the Internet (along with things like e-mail encryption software, anonymous remailers, and the proposed "Eternity Service") [Anderson, 1996b] and new storage technologies like DVDs, a future pirate is likely to require very little money to get started, and is likely to be an amateur sharing or giving away copies rather than a person making a lot of money running a CD pirating operation.

Our second reason is that the technical mechanisms proposed for enforcing copyright automatically require a lot of police-state measures.


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modified: June 25, 2001 by Douglas Anderson http://RicciStreet.net/port80/shoreline/copyright.htm

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