Copyright as Cudgel 304
kongstad writes "In an issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Siva Vaidhyanathan has some interesting things to say about the concept of Copyright: 'Back in the 20th century, if someone had accused you of copyright infringement, you enjoyed that quaint and now seemingly archaic guarantee of due process. Today, due process is a lot harder to pursue, and the burden of proof increasingly is on those accused of copyright infringement.'" A very good academic look at the recent expansions of copyright law.
Tell me something I don't know. (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe I'm just cynical, but this isn't really a surprise to me.
Technology is part of the reason for the change (Score:5, Insightful)
Today, your average home internet user can be a copyright infringer simply by using a P2P network. It is trivally easy to copy information. Copyright infringement has moved from a public corporate regulation to a private morality issue.
When copyright law was created, copying was expensive. It was hard to maintain a printing press. That only really changed with the advent of the internet. Even previous technologies such as tape recording could be ignored by lawmakers (more or less) because they did not unite the possibility of easy copying with easy mass distribution. That has changed. Modern law is struggling to keep up.
Re:Cudgel...tool...same idea, different slant (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't forget that the GPL [gnu.org] uses copyright as a tool. I believe that Eben Moglen has said that it is precisely this power that makes the GPL as successful as it has been so far. If it weren't for the power of copyright, then the protection from exploitation that much free software enjoys might not be so strong.
I don't think that cudgel is metaphorically appropriate in the case of the GPL. This article is about strengthening of copyrights being used to take away traditional rights. The GPL grants more rights than what a default copyright would grant you! Yes, it is the strenght of copyright that makes it different from public domain. But when you get right down to it, the GPL is less restrictive than just publishing something with a copyright notice and no further licence. That doesn't sound to me like using copyright as a cudgel....
-Rob
Microsoft Lawyer (Score:5, Insightful)
I was speaking with a friend of mine recently about his law practice. Because of my interest in the free software movement, I asked him if he ever works in copyright law. He does quite a bit. I asked him to explain the original intent of copyright law. He said that it was to protect inventors and authors from having their work stolen from them - to secure to them the rights to receive the benefits of their ideas. He didn't mention anything about "the progress of science and useful arts."
I told him my reason for asking about copyright and explained the basics of the GNU GPL. It turns out that he's one of the regional lawyers for Microsoft. It was counter-intuitive to him that people would contribute to a product as a peer-production effort without receiving a direct monetary reward. His impression of the open source community was that they are a bunch of hooligan pirates who don't want to pay for anything and will steal intellectual property rather than pay for it.
This was rather shocking to me because I'm not a pirate. I don't have any illegally-obtained recordings, movies, or software. I don't share my copies with those who ask. I view open source as a superior development model, not as a malicious piracy scheme.
What I learned from this experience is that we need to do more educating of people. We need to teach people that the free software movement has noble intentions. We have an entirely different business model and product development procedure. We don't do business the same way Microsoft does. That's offputting to people who can imagine nothing but proprietary ownership.
This post is long, but I'd like to make one more point: Why does fundamental ownership of a creation have to be a problem? I think a programmer who puts his sweat and tears into code has a fundamental right to he benefits of his work. I feel personally attached to songs that I record. Copyleft is about using that fundamental right of ownership to set the creation free and to allow others freedom to use it. In order to be able to set something free, you must first own that something.
Naming names (Score:3, Insightful)
So, Virginians, Vote Boucher!
And let's always credit the good guys and demonize the bad guys by name, party affiliation and voting district!
Re:How to take care of the situation you describe (Score:3, Insightful)
All of the above are "government-imposed controls". I'm sure you think that some of them are wrong, but, really, are they all wrong? Aren't we better off with some controls?
My personal take on taking care of the situation described is to make it illegal for any business to contribute a politician. Individuals, sure, but why should businesses be allowed to contribute?
Re:to be expected (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:to be expected (Score:3, Insightful)
tps12 posted: We've discovered that the accused is guilty 99% of the time, and that the other 1% they are only not guilty thanks to some minor technicality.
Sure, statistically speaking, the accused is more often guilty than innocent. That does not mean that you can treat people as such. The moment a person's innocence is not presumed, you open yourself up to being taken from your home in the middle of the night and thrown in a jail cell for who knows how long. Assuming people guilty until proven innocent is NOT something you can do in a free society.
Of course, I understand that the current exception to the rule is that if you're accused of being a terrorist, you can be held for months without trial. That's scary. It makes me glad that I don't live in the U.S.
I wonder if this is worth fighting... (Score:3, Insightful)
I wonder what if, instead of trying to refuse these lemons, we figured out what lemonade to make? Use these stifling constipating laws against those who impose them. Twist them back on the very sponsors.
Sometimes, when I am battling a program, when the code seems to get uglier with every fix, I feel like it's turning into another C++ morass. That's when I try to step back and look at the big picture from a fresh viewpoint, and redesign the whole thing. (If only a certain B.S. had done so with C++...
I wonder if that's possible here. Instead of fighting these ridiculous laws, is it possible to enforce them to such an extreme that the sponsors will be hoisted by their own petards? Seems like there has to be something better than beating heads against every new brick wall, like tunnelling underneath or jumping over them.
I don't know what, it just seems like maybe an idea worth considering.
Re:Cudgel...tool...same idea, different slant (Score:2, Insightful)
the article in no way attacks copyright - it even lauds its protection of fair use, first sale, abstract ideas, and limitations on copyright durations.
for those who did not ready the article, what the article _does_ attack are the destructive effects that the DMCA and CTEA have on these properties of copyright.
Re:How to take care of the situation you describe (Score:5, Insightful)
Once upon a time there was a man named Adam Smith. His thesis was that "men working to fulfill their own selfish desires will lead to benefitting society". I guess that's roughly true, but it seems he never heard of game theory.
Ok, picture this game: There are four people, each with a 100 dollars, and they're playing a game. The game is sponsored by someone. Here are the rules. Each person can put however much money they want towards the pot. Each round the pot is doubled by the sponsor and split amongst them. So if they all put in 20, they end up with 80, doubled equals 160, and split by 4 is 40. So they each end up with double they put in. Now imagine that 3 people put in 20 but the fourth person puts nothing. So the total in the pot is 60, which when doubled is 120, and divided by 4 is 30. So each of them make 10 dollars profit, except for the person who put in nothing, who made 30 dollars profit.
So what happens when they tried this in real life? Well in the first round they all put in about half their money. But each round they put in succesively less and less until by the last round, they've all learned their lesson, and put in nothing.
So imagine further, a new rule. Anyone can pay 3 dollars to take away 10 dollars from someone else. So now if the fourth one puts in nothing, the three others pay 3 dollars each and take away all 30 dollars that he won, ending up with a profit of zero, but they each won 7 dollars profit. So this new rule totally changed the nature of the game, and actually, paradoxically, made it easier to trust each other.
You know what happened in this game? It started out the same...they each bet half of what they had. But each round after that, the slowly bet more and more, till the last round when they all bet the whole pot, and really made a ton of money.
So what's the lesson here? Changing the rules a little bit can help everybody. That's the governments job. Just because the government is forcing a business to do something doesn't mean they don't want to do it. It might just mean that they want to do it, but they want to make sure the others have to do it too.
Like software patents. Getting rid of them would definitely help the software industry, but they still hoarde them and prosecute them because they get the same treatment from the others.
I know, you're a libertarian, so you likely agree with me about software patents, but government is not bad. The US government is bad, they never do anything right, it's shameful. But that shouldn't turn you off to the idea of government. I think you'd agree that certain 'public' things are best taken care of by non-commercial entities. Schools. Libraries. Roads. Public transport.
Let's look at public transport. Even though the city usually does not recoup money from bus and train fares, it doesn't matter. The city doesn't recoup money for laying and maintaining roads either. Almost anything with very low scarcity, but a high fixed cost should be publicly funded, because it's the most efficient system. If you charge excessively, less people use it, and since there's no scarcity (no marginal cost) the less people who use it, the higher the cost PER use, and hence the lower efficiency.
"Government" is not inherently bad, you really should consider that possibility.
Going about it the wrong way... (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the reason thye anti-DMCA and Bono Act forces aren't getting traction with the public is they are doing a poor job of building that 'literature of abuse'. We need to get away from the examples involving hacker groups, cryptologists discussing obscure algorythms and p2p piracy (never allow them to couple p2p with copyright -- two different issues). Instead we need to concentrate on examples that resonate with the mythical Joe Sixpack.
A week or so ago I had dinner with a couple of journalists... neither of them particularily Tech savy. Some how the conversation turned to these copyright issues. I've reak a lot of the stuff on Chilling Effects [chillingeffects.com] quite carefully. I started out with the stories of the Underwater Gardening mailgroup [salon.com] problems and the poor lady and her Dragon Art [dreslough.com] that got stomped on by Anne McCaffrey. Both of those stories resonatedwith my listeners because they were "little guy getting squashed" stories. We then moved onto the Bona Act and some of the DMCA issues Both of these journalists requested the URL to Chilling Effects so they could read further.
In short, don't present a non-technical person with technical examples they'll have difficulting sympathizing with. Use some simple marketting and engage them with human interest stories... stories they can relate to. The little guy getting screwed never sits well with the public, we need to build up a literature of those types of stories to redefine the 'spin' of the debate.
Write YOUR congressman (Score:2, Insightful)
So write to YOUR congressman or senators. Only three people in congress represent you, not all of them. And be sure to let them know you live in their district or state.
(Which is why this sort of thing particularly pisses me off - I live in DC, so I have only one person representing me, and she doesn't even get a vote!)
Simple solution: Don't vote for the Incumbant (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Shoddy reasoning (Score:2, Insightful)
Now, the DMCA does provide specific exclusions for service providers, but the unfortunate reality is that the majority of ISPs prefer to simply comply with the copyright holders rather than wage a lengthy, costly legal battle.
Thus, the DMCA (at best) adds an extra level of complexity to digital copyright and obscures the user's right to due process, by adding an additional party between the copyright holder and the copyright infringer. It is also important to note that this additional party is not trained in copyright law nor does it exist to protect intellectual property; it exists to provide internet-related services to customers. It is composed of technicians -- not lawyers, not police.
The purpose is to make digital copyright realistically enforceable, and, to a large degree, the DMCA is successful in this regard. But at what price? By shifting the burden from the copyright holder to the service provider and end user, it is now easier to prohibit actual violations, but it is also easier to suppress free speech and other usage forms protected by traditional copyright laws, such as the oft-cited fair use.