The Tyranny of Copyright? 410
Pinky3 writes "The Sunday New York Times Magazine has a long article entitled The Tyranny of Copyright? Views of both supporters of CopyLeft (Lessig and Zittrain) and Copyright (Ginsberg and Goldstein) are laid out. The article constrasts the cultural commons to the 'permission culture" and covers the unintended consequences of various US laws passed long ago." Dear NYT editors: "Copy Left" really shouldn't have a space in it. Thanks.
Please state the registration requirement in blurb (Score:2, Informative)
CopyLEFT says... (Score:4, Funny)
CopyRIGHT says: duh...We have strategerie ha ha ha
CopyLEFT says: You might think you know where the lockbox is, and maybe you do. Or maybe that's a dummy, or a decoy lockbox. Only me and Tipper and the Secretary of Defense will know for sure.
corrections (Score:4, Funny)
Re:corrections (Score:5, Insightful)
Seeing as Slashdot has kepts its errors rather internal, rather than damaging most of humanity, I'd say they can comment just fine.
Re:corrections (Score:2)
Most of humanity doesn't speak english...
Re:corrections (Score:2)
Re:Damage to English? (Score:2)
What's more, the imbecile who printed the error, then publicly defended it as being correct with misguided explanations as to why. An editor directly changed the English language for the worse.
Re:corrections (Score:2)
Were not NYT writers and editors the imbeciles responsible for irreparably damaging the English language by convincing millions of people that a comma was not needed before the and in a series?
No, that was the British, who invented the language and who tend to use a lot less punctuation than Americans do.
Re:corrections (Score:2)
copy left (Score:5, Funny)
This should be a new definition of irony... (Score:5, Funny)
"Dear NYT editors: 'Copy Left' really shouldn't have a space in it. Thanks."
"the Copy Left" (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure that it's accurate to lump everyone who's opposed to the current copyright schemes together as "leftists," which seems to be the implication. Indeed, one would think that a return to a 14 + 14 "founder's copyright" would be not so much radical as reactionary.
Re:"the Copy Left" (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed, there's a right-anarchist argument that, unlike private property, copyright is nothing but a government-created monopoly. (Of course, there's also a left-anarchist argument that private property is a government-created monopoly too, but I'm not so sure -- territory is a pretty fundamental idea for a lot of species that don't have governments or copyright.)
I don't think the argument extends, though, to one of the other disparate bits of law that's lumped into the nonsense rubric of "intellectual property" -- trademark. A trademark, like a person's signature, isn't property so much as it is a kind of statement about the trademarked goods: "This luncheon meat was made by the Hormel company," "This document was signed by John Hancock." Falsely applying someone else's trademark to the goods you sell is like forging their signature on an IOU: it's not a property violation against the person whose sigil you forge, but rather a fraud against your customer, or whomever you're passing the IOU to.
(Yes, "right-anarchist" is another word for the American use of "libertarian", and "left-anarchist" for the European "libertarian socialist" or the American "anarchist".)
Re:"the Copy Left" (Score:5, Informative)
scripsit Frater 219:
Actually, the idea that private property is a government-created monopoly is not just an anarchist idea. Without taking a stand on whether it is a good thing or not, it is pretty clearly something that doesn't exist without state enforcement. It's important to distinguish ``property'' in the sense of ``my stuff'' from ``property'' in the sense of something that remains mine whether or not it's in my actual possession or use, and which I can have legal recourse to regain if I lose. The latter is what is provided by the state, not the former. (Many versions of socialist thought, BTW, make this distinction, too. Your house, your computer, your trousers are yours, it's just things like factories and farmland you don't farm yourself that you can't own.)
These ideas are also based on the idea that property is primarily land. In order to have claim to land that you're not actually using (for example, holding for speculation or renting to tenants), you have to have a state to enforce it -- or you have to have a private army in an anarchic situation. This is what Hobbes was referring to in his famous ``nasty, brutish, and short'' quote: without a state you would never get anything done, because you would have to waste all your effort employing violence to keep hold of your goods and land.
What you're calling ``left anarchists'' would hold that the state enforcement required to keep hold of property that is being rented by others (or simply in disuse) is oppressive. The idea is that if you're not actually using it, you don't really need it, and you're only using the state to squeeze wealth out of the people who really do need it.
Re:A serious question (Score:5, Interesting)
The taxes that you're talking about aren't related to ownership, they're translated to sales or profit/loss.
For instance, most people pay property taxes on a house or land they own.
Some states have car taxes. Others have luxury taxes.
If people really thought there was such a thing as "Intellectual Property", then it would have occured to somebody to tax it.
In fact, I can make a pitch that this tax would benefit society at large. Think of it:
1) IP that is generating revenue would have to be fairly valued
2) For IP that is not really worth anything (some old movie that isn't even available), the owner would have to either pay taxes on it, or release it to the public domain.
3) IP owners wouldn't be content to "sit" on something.
Like I said, I'm not advocating taxes, but if we're going to call a copyright, "Intellectual Property", I'm saying we should go all the way and really treat it like property. Taxes and all.
Re:"the Copy Left" (Score:2)
I would argue that a significant chunk of those in favour of the CopyLeft scheme have a tendency to be more Libertarian, than Left.
Of course, I am cynical enough to believe that either party would make bad copyright laws if you paid them enough. It just so happens that the Democrats are already in the MPAA/RIAA's poc
Good to see this in the mainstream press (Score:5, Interesting)
Hopefully this indicates that the media is starting to understand that there can be another way. Free software and truly open standards will never become widely adopted while the mainstream view is "how can anything with little or no copyright restrictions be any good?"
Re:Good to see this in the mainstream press (Score:5, Insightful)
"Why would you give away your work for free?"
She was completely dumbfounded. The problem is that the older generations still have the protestant work ethic. In our generation the protestant work ethic has died. People are willing to actually do some amount of work for the greater good of society. After we meet our needs by doing "real" work, we are willing to do things that are both productive and fun for the good of others. This has not happened often in history because usually leisure activities are not productive. The rise of geekdom has created the furst truly productive leisure activity, writing software. And since it doesn't cost anything to make, we give it away for free with little or no copyright. This new way of thinking completely dumbfounds anyone who is used to it the other way.
Re:Good to see this in the mainstream press (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Good to see this in the mainstream press (Score:5, Insightful)
Ben Franklin refused a patent on the Franklin Stove, saying it was his civic responsibility to share.
Salk, when asked if he intended to patent the polio vaccine, said that would be "like patenting the sun."
Greed may drive innovation in some cases, but only when there are strong limitations on the duration of the patent/copyright. When you let the rules be set by the greedy like Disney and Microsoft, we get nothing but permanent proprietary lock-ins.
Re:Good to see this in the mainstream press (Score:4, Interesting)
The costs of computer hardware and software are already absorbed, as they are neccessary for other portions of geek life, so it is essentially cost free.
And, this is what many current megacorps are scared of, because Open Source isn't the FIRST productive leisure activity.
I write for leisure. Many musicians play music for leisure. Lots of people write poetry in their leisure time. Some people do stand-up comedy for free.
The dark secret is, people enjoy entertaining people, and they even find that entertainment fun in its own right, even if the audience is lost. (In fact, jokes that go over the heads of the audience are often the best ones).
In the current society, much of entertainment is free to make. My word-processor and a site to host a story? Some instruments and a garage for a band? A napkin to jot poetry and internet distribution? The overhead is gone, and now all hell will break loose (but in a good way).
Re:Good to see this in the mainstream press (Score:2)
Re:Good to see this in the mainstream press (Score:3, Informative)
yes, foreword.
thanks.
Re:Good to see this in the mainstream press (Score:5, Insightful)
Even the production of intellectual property -- the idea of freely sharing ideas -- has been around for a long time. For example, 'Fine Woodworking' magazine, about as far away from software as you can get, has a space where readers write in a blurb about the clever ways that they've used to solve problems. There is some marginal compensation for the 'best' one in each issue, but people share their ideas -- their IP -- with others because there's a sense of community.
Productive leisure activity has been around for as long as knitting, sewing, painting and whittling.
In reality, part of the reason that many people give away the product of their work is because there is no reasonable way for them to make money off of it: Not only is there no inexpensive mechanism to charge, but there isn't even a good way to figure out how much to charge.
There are also non-monetary forms of payback. Law Reviews, for example, generally don't pay anything to the writers of their articles. But, the writers get prestiege in a specific community. People who contribute to free (as in speech) software also receive similar benefits.
Occasionally pragmatic business reasons for doing so exist, especially in the world of communications standards. For example, the IETF relies on 'loose consensus and running code' in the promulgation of internet standards. If you're a corporation trying to push a standard, you can help yourself by publishing a free version.
There are probably people producing software just out of the goodness of their hearts, with no desire for any other benefit to themselves. But, I don't think you can characterize the entire free software movement as being like that.
Even James Boyle, one of the 'Copy Left' people in the book, has said that he likes earning royalties from the publication of his works. (I happened to take a class from him in the fall.)
Re:Good to see this in the mainstream press (Score:2)
Even if they are doing this for self serving reasons (which I doubt, I think these problems are really starting to be more than "flukes" so they are worth reporting on in the
Public Apathy (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Public Apathy (Score:2)
Compound that with the "new digital age" thinking that seems to be prevalent in congress, and we've got a problem. They all seem to think that America's best way to stay competitive is to create a lot of legal support for "Intellectual Property".
But, since it's the Disneys of the world that are in their ears, t
They are the best laws that money can buy. (Score:2)
And even when they are paid for, some companies are still usurping them to chill commentary or block competition. If you have any doubt of that, just look at actions of Lexmark, Mattel and Dibold.
Good choice of words (Score:5, Interesting)
Simon
I hereby,,, (Score:2, Funny)
If any Geekgirl wishes to gain access to my DNA, please send a picture and an essay on the effects of GPL and the software industry and what effects this will have on humanity in whole.
B with blue eyes can skip the essay.
Thank you.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVXXIVVIIIIVVIIIXIIIIIVIIVIII
Tyranny? (Score:2, Insightful)
In a vacuum? (Score:5, Insightful)
Copyright protection encourages creation.
Lessig maintains that overbroad restrictions on preparing derivative works discourages creation.
Nobody else has any right to works I've created.
What did you draw on when creating works? Or did you claim that you created works in a vacuum?
Re:In a vacuum? (Score:2)
That is very different from advocating the abolishment of IP rights, which Lessig does NOT advocate.
Other authors own your expression (Score:4, Interesting)
Is this suppose to be a rhetorical argument that a creator doesn't own what he creates?
I intended it as an argument that an author shouldn't own what other authors create.
the innovation is not identical to the source, I have added my own novel element.
True, you can get away with copying ideas. But what about classes of works where the "idea" and the "expression" aren't so easy to distinguish, such as musical works? Under U.S. law, if you add your novel element to a substantial portion of an existing copyrighted expression without permission of the other work's author, which is not obtainable in the vast majority of cases, the other work's author owns your novel element, even if your novel element predominates over the other author's.
The novel element is my property, for a limited time at least, and rightly so.
In terms of an author's own lifetime, how is until your children are long dead a "limited time", other than through the twisted interpretation offered by the Supreme Court in Eldred v. Ashcroft? Inventors, on the other hand, seem happy with 20 years; I don't recall any news report of them trying for some sort of Cher Patent Term Extension Act [kuro5hin.org].
To say that society owns what a creator's brain creates is to say that society owns the creator's brain. It doesn't.
But to say that one author owns what another author creates is to say that one author owns the other author's brain. He does.
I agree with the position on derivative works and copyright term that Spider Robinson puts forth in the short story "Melancholy Elephants" [baen.com]. Have you read it?
Re:Tyranny? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Tyranny? (Score:2)
The purpose of society is not to force smart people to work. If the man is a genius, he can write another. Society should give some motivation, but not by giving no rewards.
Now, I do agree that the parent was dumb, I just think your argument sucks as well.
28 years is still a reward; analogy to patents (Score:4, Insightful)
Society should give some motivation, but not by giving no rewards.
The original U.S. copyright act gave plenty of rewards: twenty-eight whole years. The current U.S. patent act gives plenty of rewards: twenty whole years. If you feel that such a term of monopoly does not adequately reward the investment of time and effort into a work or invention, then please explain why I haven't seen Lilly, GSK, Pfizer, and the like publicly lobbying for some sort of Cher Patent Term Extension Act [kuro5hin.org].
Re:Tyranny? (Score:2)
Re:Tyranny? (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, coming back to reality, let's assume that you're the average writer who gets published, who doesn't earn much if anythi
Re:Tyranny? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Tyranny? (Score:2)
I don't know.
If copyright were - as is the case now - 70 years, is anyone else hurt? I don't think so.
Re:Tyranny? (Score:2)
Re:Tyranny? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Tyranny? (Score:2)
Proof? Before you answer that remember that correlation doesn't equal causation, and that 90% of everything is crap.
Nobody else has any right to works I've created.
That's called begging the question.
For those who don't want to subscribe (Score:3, Informative)
The Tyranny of Copyright?
By ROBERT S. BOYNTON
Published: January 25, 2004
ast fall, a group of civic-minded students at Swarthmore College received a sobering lesson in the future of political protest. They had come into possession of some 15,000 e-mail messages and memos -- presumably leaked or stolen -- from Diebold Election Systems, the largest maker of electronic voting machines in the country. The memos featured Diebold employees' candid discussion of flaws in the company's software and warnings that the computer network was poorly protected from hackers. In light of the chaotic 2000 presidential election, the Swarthmore students decided that this information shouldn't be kept from the public. Like aspiring Daniel Ellsbergs with their would-be Pentagon Papers, they posted the files on the Internet, declaring the act a form of electronic whistle-blowing.
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Unfortunately for the students, their actions ran afoul of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (D.M.C.A.), one of several recent laws that regulate intellectual property and are quietly reshaping the culture. Designed to protect copyrighted material on the Web, the act makes it possible for an Internet service provider to be liable for the material posted by its users -- an extraordinary burden that providers of phone service, by contrast, do not share. Under the law, if an aggrieved party (Diebold, say) threatens to sue an Internet service provider over the content of a subscriber's Web site, the provider can avoid liability simply by removing the offending material. Since the mere threat of a lawsuit is usually enough to scare most providers into submission, the law effectively gives private parties veto power over much of the information published online -- as the Swarthmore students would soon learn.
Not long after the students posted the memos, Diebold sent letters to Swarthmore charging the students with copyright infringement and demanding that the material be removed from the students' Web page, which was hosted on the college's server. Swarthmore complied. The question of whether the students were within their rights to post the memos was essentially moot: thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, their speech could be silenced without the benefit of actual lawsuits, public hearings, judges or other niceties of due process.
After persistent challenges by the students -- and a considerable amount of negative publicity for Diebold -- in November the company agreed not to sue. To the delight of the students' supporters, the memos are now back on their Web site. But to proponents of free speech on the Internet, the story remains a chilling one.
Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media scholar at New York University, calls anecdotes like this ''copyright horror stories,'' and there have been a growing number of them over the past few years. Once a dry and seemingly mechanical area of the American legal system, intellectual property law can now be found at the center of major disputes in the arts, sciences and -- as in the Diebold case -- politics. Recent cases have involved everything from attempts to force the Girl Scouts to pay royalties for singing songs around campfires to the infringement suit brought by the estate of Margaret Mitchell against the publishers of Alice Randall's book ''The Wind Done Gone'' (which tells the story of Mitchell's ''Gone With the Wind'' from a slave's perspective) to corporations like Celera Genomics filing for patents for human genes. The most publicized development came in September, when the Recording Industry Association of America began suing music downloaders for copyright infringement, reaching out-of-court settlements for thousands of dollars with defendants as young as 12. And in November, a group of independent film producers went to court to fight a ban, imposed this year by the Motion Picture Association of America, on sending DVD's to those who vote for annual film awards.
Not long ago, the Internet's ability to provide instant, inexpensive and perfect copies of text, sound and images was heralded with the phrase ''information wants to be free.'' Yet the implications of this freedom have frightened some creators -- particularly those in the recording, publishing and movie industries -- who argue that the greater ease of copying and distribution increases the need for more stringent intellectual property laws. The movie and music industries have succeeded in lobbying lawmakers to allow them to tighten their grips on their creations by lengthening copyright terms. The law has also extended the scope of copyright protection, creating what critics have called a ''paracopyright,'' which prohibits not only duplicating protected material but in some cases even gaining access to it in the first place. In addition to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the most significant piece of new legislation is the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act, which added 20 years of protection to past and present copyrighted works and was upheld by the Supreme Court a year ago. In less than a decade, the much-ballyhooed liberating potential of the Internet seems to have given way to something of an intellectual land grab, presided over by legislators and lawyers for the media industries.
In response to these developments, a protest movement is forming, made up of lawyers, scholars and activists who fear that bolstering copyright protection in the name of foiling ''piracy'' will have disastrous consequences for society -- hindering the ability to experiment and create and eroding our democratic freedoms. This group of reformers, which Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School, calls the ''free culture movement,'' might also be thought of as the ''Copy Left'' (to borrow a term originally used by software programmers to signal that their product bore fewer than the usual amount of copyright restrictions). Lawyers and professors at the nation's top universities and law schools, the members of the Copy Left aren't wild-eyed radicals opposed to the use of copyright, though they do object fiercely to the way copyright has been distorted by recent legislation and manipulated by companies like Diebold. Nor do they share a coherent political ideology. What they do share is a fear that the United States is becoming less free and ultimately less creative. While the American copyright system was designed to encourage innovation, it is now, they contend, being used to squelch it. They see themselves as fighting for a traditional understanding of intellectual property in the face of a radical effort to turn copyright law into a tool for hoarding ideas. ''The notion that intellectual property rights should never expire, and works never enter the public domain -- this is the truly fanatical and unconstitutional position,'' says Jonathan Zittrain, a co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, the intellectual hub of the Copy Left.
Thinkers like Lessig and Zittrain promote a vision of a world in which copyright law gives individual creators the exclusive right to profit from their intellectual property for a brief, limited period -- thus providing an incentive to create while still allowing successive generations of creators to draw freely on earlier ideas. They stress that borrowing and collaboration are essential components of all creation and caution against being seduced by the romantic myth of ''the author'': the lone garret-dwelling poet, creating masterpieces out of thin air. ''No one writes from nothing,'' says Yochai Benkler, a professor at Yale Law School. ''We all take the world as it is and use it, remix it.''
Where does the Copy Left believe a creation ought to go once its copyright has lapsed? Into the public domain, or the ''cultural commons'' -- a shared stockpile of ideas where the majority of America's music and literature would reside, from which anyone could partake without having to pay or ask permission. James Boyle, a professor at Duke Law School, notes that the public domain is a necessity for social and cultural progress, not some sort of socialist luxury. ''Our art, our culture, our science depend on this public domain,'' he has written, ''every bit as much as they depend on intellectual property.''
In opposition to the cultural commons stands the ''permission culture,'' an epithet the Copy Left uses to describe the world it fears our current copyright law is creating. Whereas you used to own the CD or book you purchased, in the permission culture it is more likely that you'll lease (or ''license'') a song, video or e-book, and even then only under restrictive conditions: read your e-book, but don't copy and paste any selections; listen to music on your MP3 player, but don't burn it onto a CD or transfer it to your stereo. The Copy Left sees innovations like iTunes, Apple's popular online music store, as the first step toward a society in which much of the cultural activity that we currently take for granted -- reading an encyclopedia in the public library, selling a geometry textbook to a friend, copying a song for a sibling -- will be rerouted through a system of micropayments in return for which the rights to ever smaller pieces of our culture are doled out. ''Sooner or later,'' predicts Miriam Nisbet, the legislative counsel for the American Library Association, ''you'll get to the point where you say, 'Well, I guess that 25 cents isn't too much to pay for this sentence,' and then there's no hope and no going back.''
There is a growing sense of urgency among the members of the Copy Left. They worry that if they do not raise awareness of what is happening to copyright law, Americans will be stuck forever with the consequences of decisions now being made -- and laws being passed -- in the name of preventing piracy. ''We are at a moment in our history at which the terms of freedom and justice are up for grabs,'' Benkler says. He notes that each major innovation in the history of communications -- the printing press, radio, telephone -- was followed by a brief period of openness before the rules of its usage were determined and alternatives eliminated. ''The Internet,'' he says, ''is in that space right now.''
America has always had an ambivalent attitude toward the notion of intellectual property. Thomas Jefferson, for one, considered copyright a necessary evil: he favored providing just enough incentive to create, nothing more, and thereafter allowing ideas to flow freely as nature intended. ''If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property,'' he wrote, ''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.'' His conception of copyright was enshrined in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, which gives Congress the authority 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.''
But Jefferson's vision has not fared well. As the country's economy developed from agrarian to industrial to ''information,'' ideas took on greater importance, and the demand increased for stronger copyright laws. In 1790, copyright protection lasted for 14 years and could be renewed just once before the work entered the public domain. Between 1831 and 1909, the maximum term was increased from 28 to 56 years. Today, copyright protection for individuals lasts for 70 years after the death of the author; for corporations, it's 95 years after publication. Over the past three decades, the flow of material entering the public domain has slowed to a trickle: in 1973, according to Lessig, more than 85 percent of copyright owners chose not to renew their copyrights, allowing their ideas to become common coin; since the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act lengthened present and past copyrights for an additional 20 years, little material will enter the public domain any time soon.
Some of the changes that expanded copyright protection were made with an understanding of their effects; what also troubles the Copy Left, however, are the unintended consequences of seemingly innocuous tweaks in copyright legislation. In particular, two laws that were passed years before the creation of the Internet helped set the stage for today's copyright bonanza. Before the 1909 Copyright Act, copyright was construed as the exclusive right to ''publish'' a creation; but the 1909 law changed the wording to prohibit others from ''copying'' one's creation -- a seemingly minor change that thereafter linked copyright protection to the copying technology of the day, whether that was the pen, the photocopy machine, the VCR or the Internet. In 1976, a revision to the law dispensed with the requirement of formally registering or renewing a copyright in order to comply with international copyright standards. Henceforth, everything -- from e-mail messages to doodles on a napkin -- was automatically copyrighted the moment it was ''fixed in a tangible medium.''
The true significance of these two laws didn't become apparent until the arrival of the Internet, when every work became automatically protected by copyright and every use of a work via the Internet constituted a new copy. ''Nobody realized that eliminating those requirements would create a nightmare of uncertainty and confusion about what content is available to use,'' Lessig explains, ''which is a crucial question now that the Internet is the way we gain access to so much content. It was a kind of oil spill in the free culture.''
Lessig is one of the most prominent and eloquent defenders of the Copy Left's belief that copyright law should return to its Jeffersonian roots. ''We are invoking ideas that should be central to the American tradition, such as that a free society is richer than a control society,'' he says. ''But in the cultural sphere, big media wants to build a new Soviet empire where you need permission from the central party to do anything.'' He complains that Americans have been reduced to ''an Oliver Twist-like position,'' in which they have to ask, ''Please, sir, may I?'' every time we want to use something under copyright -- and then only if we are fortunate enough to have the assistance of a high-priced lawyer.
In October 2002, Lessig argued before the Supreme Court in Eldred v. Ashcroft, which concerned a challenge to the Copyright Term Extension Act. On behalf of the plaintiffs, Lessig argued that perpetually extending the term of copyright was a violation of the Constitution's requirement that copyright exist for ''a limited time.'' The court responded that although perhaps unwise on policy grounds, granting such extensions was within Congress's power. It was a major setback for the Copy Left. Given the Eldred decision, there is nothing to stop a future Congress from extending copyright's term again and again.
Lessig's efforts haven't been limited to the courtroom. In 2001, he was part of a group that founded an organization called Creative Commons, which offers individual creators the ability to carefully calibrate the level of control they wish to maintain over their works. The organization services the needs of, say, musicians who want rappers and D.J.'s to be able to download and remix their music without legal trouble or of writers who want their works republished without charge, but only by nonprofit publications. The Commons has developed a software application for the Web that allows copyright holders who do not want to exercise all of the restrictions of copyright law to dedicate their work to the public domain or license it on terms that allow copying and creative reuses. The aim of Creative Commons is not only to increase the sum of raw source material online but also to make it cheaper and easier for other creators to locate and access that material. This will enable people to use the Internet to find, for example, photographs that are free to be altered or reused or texts that may be copied, distributed or sampled -- all by their authors' permission. The Creative Commons now has a presence in 10 countries, including Brazil, whose minister of culture, the musician Gilberto Gil, plans to release some of his songs under the Creative Commons license so that others may freely borrow from them. Creative Commons is currently talking to Amazon and others about a plan to release out-of-print books under Creative Commons licenses.
One of the central ideas of the Copy Left is that the Internet has been a catalyst for re-engaging with the culture -- for interacting with the things we read and watch and listen to, as opposed to just sitting back and absorbing them. This vision of how culture works stands in contrast to what the Copy Left calls the ''broadcast model'' -- the arrangement in which a small group of content producers disseminate their creations (television, movies, music) through controlled routes (cable, theaters, radio-TV stations) to passive consumers. Yochai Benkler, the law professor at Yale, argues that people want to be more engaged in their culture, despite the broadcast technology, like television, that he says has narcotized us. ''People are users,'' he says. ''They are producers, storytellers, consumers, interactors -- complex, varied beings, not just people who go to the store, buy a packaged good off the shelf and consume.''
A few weeks ago, I met Benkler in his loft in downtown New York. He stroked his beard while explicating his ideas with the care of a man parsing a particularly knotty question of Scripture. Benkler was born in Tel Aviv in 1964, and while in his 20's, he helped found a remote desert kibbutz in an attempt to recapture the Zionist movement's original socialist spirit. The challenges of creating a community in isolation from the rest of society ultimately proved overwhelming. ''After a few years,'' he said, ''we realized that at the rate we were going we wouldn't attend college until we were in our 50's.'' It was a hard lesson in the difficulty of producing anything -- a community, a work of art -- in isolation.
But Benkler's belief in the importance of creating things in common rests on more than anecdotal evidence. What makes his argument more than wishful thinking, he said, is that he has some economic evidence for his view. ''Let's compare a few numbers,'' he said. ''How much do people pay the recording industry to listen to music versus how much people pay the telephone industry to talk to their friends and family? The recording industry is a $12 billion a year business, compared with the telephone business, which is a more than $250 billion a year business. That is what economists call a 'revealed willingness to pay,' a clear preference for a technology that allows you to participate in work, socializing and interaction in general, over a technology that allows you to be a passive consumer of a packaged good. Is that a study of human nature? No. Is it an economic measure that would suggest there is a lot of demand out there for speaking and listening to others? Yes.''
According to Benkler, the cultural commons not only offers a better model for creativity; it makes good economic sense. Like Lessig and other members of the Copy Left, he takes his bearings from the free software movement and views the success of products like Linux and services like Google as evidence of a viable collaborative (or ''peer to peer'') model for producing and sharing ideas -- a model that will augment and, in some cases, replace the current model. (He concedes that some products, like novels and blockbuster movies, will never be produced peer to peer, though they will draw on the work of artists before them.)
Benkler predicts that the recording industry will be one of the first businesses to go. ''All it does is package and sell goods,'' he said, ''which is technically an unfeasible way of continuing. They are trying their best to legislate the environment to change, but that doesn't mean we have to let them.''
The battle between the Copy Left and its opponents is as much a clash of worldviews as of legal doctrine. Aligned against the Copy Left are those who sympathize with the romantic notion of authorship and view the culture as a market in which everything of value should be owned by someone or other. Jane Ginsburg, a professor at Columbia Law School who specializes in copyright law, fears that in the Copy Left's rush to secure the public domain, it gives short shrift to the author. A self-described ''copyright enthusiast,'' Ginsburg considers the author the moral center of copyright law and questions equating copyright control with corporate greed. ''Copyright cannot be understood merely as a grudgingly tolerated way station on the road to the public domain,'' she writes in a recent article titled ''The Concept of Authorship in Comparative Copyright Law.'' ''Because copyright arises out of the act of creating a work, authors have moral claims that neither corporate intermediaries nor consumer end-users can (straightfacedly) assert.''
Ginsburg and others embrace many elements of the ''permission society'' demonized by the Copy Left and cite developments like the iTunes store as a sign of greater consumer choice and freedom. In his book ''Copyright's Highway,'' Paul Goldstein, a professor at Stanford Law School, writes that ''the logic of property rights dictates their extension into every corner in which people derive enjoyment and value from literary and artistic works.'' He characterizes the permission society as a ''celestial jukebox'' in which access to every creation -- music, literature, movies, art -- is available to anyone for a price.
An entire ''digital rights management'' industry has arisen to bring this vision to fruition, each company calibrating a particular license through a system of micropayments -- play a song on your computer for one price; transfer it to your MP3 player for a slightly higher fee. Goldstein argues that the scheme of a business like iTunes is actually more efficient and democratic than the commons model championed by the Copy Left. ''The problem with the commons is that it doesn't take into consideration the direction of the payment; it doesn't reveal what kind of culture gets used and what kind doesn't,'' he says. ''I think it is good to have a price tag attached to each use because it tells producers what consumers want; it lets them vote with their purchase for the kinds of culture they want.''
But the Copy Left is convinced that there is a better way for the entertainment industry to adapt to the Internet age while still paying its artists their due. William Fisher, director of the Berkman Center, has spent the last three years devising an alternative compensation system that would enable the entertainment industry to restructure its business model without resorting to cumbersome micropayments. He has worked out a modified version of the system that artists' advocacy groups currently use to make sure that composers are paid when their music is performed or recorded. According to Fisher's plan, all works capable of being transmitted online would be registered with a central office (whether government or independent is unclear). The central office would then monitor how frequently a work is used and compensate the creators on that basis. The money would come from a tax on various content-related devices, like DVD burners, blank CD's or digital recorders. It is a brave proposal in a political culture that is allergic to taxes and uncomfortable with complex solutions. Still, if his numbers do indeed add up, Fisher's proposal might be the best thing that ever happened to the cultural commons: the creators would be paid, while every individual would have unlimited access to every cultural creation.
Fisher and Charles Nesson, his colleague at Harvard Law School, have showed this proposal to movie executives and lawyers for several media conglomerates. Fisher says that his ideas have been received with great interest by the very industries -- music, home video -- that see their business models disintegrating before their eyes.
When asked whether he thinks his ambitious scheme has a chance, Fisher says that the likeliest possibility would be for it to be adopted in countries that are neither so developed that they have signed on to international copyright protocols nor so undeveloped that they are desperate to do so. Only second-world countries, like Croatia or Brazil, he speculates, are unfettered enough to try something new. ''The hope is in the rain forest,'' he says, in countries that ''are more like the United States was before 1890, when we were a 'pirate' nation.''
And in the United States, is there any future for this sort of payment system? Perhaps when the various current schemes fail, Fisher's plan will seem more attractive, he says. ''What is involved here is nothing less than the shape of our culture and the way we think of ourselves as citizens,'' he adds. He describes a recent letter he received from a supporter of his work. ''When they come for my guns and my music, they'd better bring an army,'' it read. ''People are used to being creatively engaged with the culture,'' Fisher explains. ''They won't let someone legislate that away.''
The future of the Copy Left's efforts is still an open question. James Boyle has likened the movement's efforts to establish a cultural commons to those of the environmental movement in its infancy. Like Rachel Carson in the years before Earth Day, the Copy Left today is trying to raise awareness of the intellectual ''land'' to which they believe we ought to feel entitled and to propose policies and laws that will preserve it. Just as the idea of environmentalism became viable in the wake of the last century's advances in industrial production, the growth of this century's information technologies, Boyle argues, will force the country to address the erosion of the cultural commons. ''The environmentalists helped us to see the world differently,'' he writes, ''to see that there was such a thing as 'the environment' rather than just my pond, your forest, his canal. We need to do the same thing in the information environment. We have to 'invent' the public domain before we can save it.''
Re:For those who don't want to subscribe (Score:3, Insightful)
Some good, some bad (Score:4, Interesting)
" The money would come from a tax on various content-related devices, like DVD burners, blank CD's or digital recorders"
I can't believe the copyleft is saying things like that. That is not a reasonable compromise for me to get my fair-use rights back.
Fair Use (Score:4, Interesting)
Before jumping on the repeal property rights bandwagon, we should note that the Swathmore students could have easily gotten around the copyright issue by paraphrasing and writing their own original work drawn from the emails.
The article paints this issue as horrible corporate America positioned against wonderful students. However, I see a lot of issues going on beyond publication. For example, there is the issue of open communications within a corporation. If there is no legal protection for open internal discussions about a product, then companies will have no choice but to limit open dialog within the company.
Shouldn't Diebold be commended for having an open internal communication system that allows its workers to actively criticize and tear apart their company's product? If any document stolen from a company could be published to paint the company in bad light, then we would see companies cracking down on the open internal communications needed to improve products.
Having been involved in several projects, I've written and have read extremely critical emails about different aspects of a program. The purpose of these communications is generally to improve the quality of a program. Strongly worded emails generally have a better chance of making it into a product. Often the strongly worded emails are bunk. If all of the test documentation of the Alpha and design systems got published then we could make any company look horrible.
I rue the day when each and every word written in internal communications has to be polished into marketing material.
Re:Fair Use (Score:3, Interesting)
This is not a new idea. The Church of Scientology has been using the copyright laws of the United States to silence its critics for the last three decades. The Diebold case is simply the latest example of how copyright laws in their present incarnation can be abused.
Re:Fair Use (Score:3, Informative)
Here's a really good question. Were those e-mails creative? I sure as hell don't consider my e-mails creative works (well, a couple times I've e-mailed poems or story excerpts). If they do not have creative value, they don't get copyright, so the students were fine with what they did.
Now, taking my e-mails and posting them is a privacy violation, but that's another matter.
As for what I j
Re:Fair Use (Score:3, Informative)
Fair use; DMCA != DMCA (Score:4, Informative)
Actually they were in violation of copyright
News reporting. Non-profit. Factual. Does not substitute for the work itself. Any competent lawyer could make a good fair use defense.
and I question why the DMCA was involved at all.
In this case, the DMCA merely codifies a cease-and-desist process in 17 USC 512. It has nothing to do with the DMCA that interferes with interoperability (17 USC 1201; judges have tended to ignore 1201(f)) except for having been enacted in the same bill.
Infringe, or others will call it a hoax (Score:4, Interesting)
we should note that the Swathmore students could have easily gotten around the copyright issue by paraphrasing and writing their own original work drawn from the emails.
Without directly quoting the unpublished original sources, how could the students make their argument look like something other than a hoax? I sense an opportunity to use the "news reporting" fair use argument.
You can include quotes (Score:2)
A well written article with quotes and a summary of the articles would have been considered an original work, and probably would have been more damning of Diebold.
The ability of Diebold to suppress the work by threatening the ISP is freightening, as the ISP is not likely to make any judgments based on merits of the case.
Re:Fair Use (Score:2)
Dear NYT Editors: That Should Be "GNU/Copy Left" (Score:3, Interesting)
How did copyright policies come to be diametrically opposed to their stated purpose? And how can we bring them back into alignment with that purpose? To understand, we should start by looking at the root of United States copyright law: the U.S. Constitution.
Copyright in the U.S. Constitution
When the U.S. Constitution was drafted, the idea that authors were entitled to a copyright monopoly was proposed -- and rejected. The founders of our country adopted a different premise, that copyright is not a natural right of authors, but an artificial concession made to them for the sake of progress. The Constitution gives permission for a copyright system with this paragraph (Article I, Section 8):
[Congress shall have the power] to promote the progress of science and the useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that promoting progress means benefit for the users of copyrighted works. For example, in Fox Film v. Doyal, the court said,
The sole interest of the United States and the primary object in conferring the [copyright] monopoly lie in the general benefits derived by the public from the labors of authors.
This fundamental decision explains why copyright is not required by the Constitution, only permitted as an option -- and why it is supposed to last for "limited times." If copyright were a natural right, something that authors have because they deserve it, nothing could justify terminating this right after a certain period of time, any more than everyone's house should become public property after a certain lapse of time from its construction.
The "copyright bargain"
The copyright system works by providing privileges and thus benefits to publishers and authors; but it does not do this for their sake. Rather, it does this to modify their behavior: to provide an incentive for authors to write more and publish more. In effect, the government spends the public's natural rights, on the public's behalf, as part of a deal to bring the public more published works. Legal scholars call this concept the "copyright bargain." It is like a government purchase of a highway or an airplane using taxpayer's money, except that the government spends our freedom instead of our money.
But is the bargain as it exists actually a good deal for the public? Many alternative bargains are possible; which one is best? Every issue of copyright policy is part of this question. If we misunderstand the nature of the question, we will tend to decide the issues badly.
The Constitution authorizes granting copyright powers to authors. In practice, authors typically cede them to publishers; it is usually the publishers, not the authors, who exercise these powers and get most of the benefits, though authors may get a small portion. Thus it is usually the publishers that lobby to increase copyright powers. To better reflect the reality of copyright rather than the myth, this article refers to publishers rather than authors as the holders of copyright powers. It also refers to the users of copyrighted works as "readers," even though using them does not always mean reading, because "the users" is remote and abstract.
The first error: "striking a balance"
The copyright bargain places the public first: benefit for the reading public is an end in itself; benefits (if any) for publishers are just a means toward that end. Readers' interests and publishers' interests are qualitati
Confusion (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Confusion (Score:3, Informative)
Benkler's apples to oranges (Score:3, Interesting)
This comparison fails to be useful in any real sense when considered for even an instant. The infrastructure, engineering and complexity of the telecommunication industry probably would scale its market value, when compared to music, much more than roughly 20 / 1 factor Benkler notes here. In fact, the only force surpressing greater telecom revenue is that consumers absolutely abhor seemingly arbitrary and maddeningly discreet fees associated with their monthly tele/cell phone bills!
To think that the billing lessons from the telecom industry offer a positive model for entertainment is not only ludacris, it's insulting to consumers who increasingly feel pestered by a fee system which forces them to nickel and dime every conversation down to minutes used -- and the excitement of VOIP proves that we are ALL hungry for an way to trash our telecom fee tally sheets.
Those who forget history are doomed to...something (Score:5, Interesting)
I appreciate the ideas the article is trying to raise in the public consciousness and I am grateful the NYT is helping to put these issues on the political map. Apparently Boynton agrees with RMS that it's important to "spread understanding of the value of freedom [gnu.org]" although Boynton wasn't writing with regard to free software. I hope that in the next articles we can get more into specifics about how these ideas were formed because I think people have an easier time grasping useful abstractions when they are grounded in real-world events.
Giving credit where credit is due is intellectually honest. This article and Mark Webbink's recently praised article [slashdot.org] both chime in on copyleft or ideas built on copyleft without giving any credit to the person or the organization that brought it to our attention--Richard Stallman and the FSF.
Webbink goes so far as to reinvent copyleft without calling it such, thus confirming how valuable the concept is and what the open source movement is missing out on by rejecting software freedom in favor of practical concerns centered on their chief audience--businesses [gnu.org]. The NYT article tells us "Copy Left[sic]" (spelled with a space probably to pigeon-hole the concept on the left side of the left-right false political dichotomy) is a borrowed term:
But that would come closer to describing free software [gnu.org]. Copyleft [gnu.org] is a way to secure the freedoms of free software for a program and its derivative works.
All rights, no responsibilities.. (Score:2)
But, that should not drag every other piece of work along with it. To keep a copyright active, they should keep the default copyright mechanism they have today, for a short period of time, like 7-15 years. Then, require them to register the work for copyright extensions of 5-10 years. As it is now, they were gifted these huge
Re:All rights, no responsibilities.. (Score:3, Interesting)
In fact, it would be fine by me to have a couple of exemptions for well-known characters - with fees paid to the Treasury rather than influential congressmen. Although I'd really prefer that Mickey not have eternal protection, it would probably be better than letting everything else be dragged down with it.
But it wouldn't work out - They would just take advantage of the cheaper path, which is to give a smaller amount to electe
The NYT doesn't like InterCap names (Score:2, Informative)
So, call it Copyleft and you're fine.
a telling sentence.... (Score:2)
''Sooner or later,'' predicts Miriam Nisbet, the legislative counsel for the American Library Association, ''you'll get to the point where you say, 'Well, I guess that 25 cents isn't too much to pay for this sentence,' and then there's no hope and no going back.''
Yep... now raise your hands... how many of you have gone down that path, purchasing iTunes and DVDs? Yeah, that's what I thought.
Canada (Score:5, Informative)
Um, this is already partially implemented in Canada [slashdot.org]. We pay a levy on recordable media, and as a result downloading is legal. Supposedly, the levy is supposed to go to the artists and recording industry. The only thing missing is the "central office", otherwise it is very much like Fisher's concept. And I hardly think Canada [thecanadapage.org] qualifies as a second world country.
Copyleft *is* Copyright (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Where is everybody? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not sure why, but I am beginning to understand the community feeling of hate towards 'michael' simply by his attempting to slant comments in his way of favour.
Slashdot is not a news source, it is a news aggregator, but appending the aggregation of stories with comments by the editors with effect to bias the stor
Re:Where is everybody? (Score:4, Funny)
But then you assume
Re:no copyrights... no NYT registration (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:no copyrights... no NYT registration (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:no copyrights... no NYT registration (Score:3, Insightful)
You would have to agree to an NDA before you bought a copy.
Re:no copyrights... no NYT registration (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:no copyrights... no NYT registration (Score:2, Interesting)
I doubt that. The NYT gets paid mostly by advertisers and secondarily by people who want to read today's news and commentary. I don't think lack of a copyright would change that. Wouldn't give a you a nickle for yesterday's NYT.
Re:no copyrights... no NYT registration (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:no copyrights... no NYT registration (Score:5, Insightful)
Another human attribute which occurs from time to time is that they don't care about recognition, they just want to spread their ideas for the betterment or enjoyment of all mankind.
Re:no copyrights... no NYT registration (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:no copyrights... no NYT registration (Score:4, Insightful)
Additionally no drug company who spent millions on research is going to want to come out and say "you could pay us thousands for our patented drug but eating oranges would work just as well."
I agree with you. We need more research done with an eye toward bettering mankind over forcing mankind to fork over the bucks.
Re:no copyrights... no NYT registration (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, as they say in their press releases they spend 100s of millions on their research budgets for drugs that don't pay off, but what their press releases don't say is that they spend MORE that their research budgets on marketing and lobbying. They also don't mention that the sum of the yearly compensation packages of the top ten executives of any pharmaceutical company is usually *at least* 10% of the company's total research budget.
There needs to be a middle ground between no profits and obscene profits that provides the maximum benefit for the society at large.
Re:no copyrights... no NYT registration (Score:3, Insightful)
source [wnyc.org]
In an illiterate so
Re:no copyrights... no NYT registration (Score:3, Funny)
=Smidge=
Re:no copyrights... no NYT registration (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a relative thing, sure, and I'm not trying to argue that copyright isn't a little too much in favour of the copyright holders, but if there was no protection, there would be no reason for at least 90% of the information being published to be published.
As much as we want to have a free society, you still expect to be paid for the hours you work, right? Well, you have to fol
Re:no copyrights... no NYT registration (Score:3, Interesting)
By preventing others from using and building on the ideas freely.
You care to point out some examples? I hardly can imagine how other people copyrights prevent me from getting ideas. Or building ideas. Or building ideas on the base of their copyrighted work. Or in distributing my ideas.
No one can prevent me in saying: ".... as Kent Recal has pointed out on
Derivative works (Score:5, Informative)
Dr. Lessig doesn't want to abolish copyright. He merely wants to find some way around the draconian restrictions on derivative works. Such restrictions lead to injustices such as Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music, 420 F. Supp. 177 (S.D.N.Y. 1976) [columbia.edu], which held that subconscious copying of a copyrighted work is actionable infringement.
Or do you claim that authors create works in a vacuum?
Re:Derivative works (Score:2)
Fine and dandy. But if you weaken copyrights too much the creators will protect their works using other means, including DRM. It's their choice, after all.
Re:By default (Score:2)
And that Digitally Restricted Medium won't be legally protected. So they wouldn't be able to go after people for saying "Oh, by the way, if you flip this bit, you can copy just fine."
Re:Derivative works (Score:4, Informative)
I guess that's not entirely untrue. The NBC tune is only three notes long, and it would certainly be theft if ABC were to used them. But in that case it's the entire piece. It's also the context there: I can't imagine you'd be sued if you weren't thematically invoking NBC in your song.
In Bright Tunes, the judge felt that three notes used as only part of a song, and not deliberately invoking the other piece, were sufficient for Harrison to be riding on the back of Ronnie Mack's success.
Re:no copyrights... no NYT registration (Score:5, Informative)
Misplaced agression.
The problem isn't the existence of copyright, it is the abuse of the idea.
If there were no copyright, there would be no GPL either (the GPL depends on copyright for its ability to force sharing).
Copyrights that run for 7 generations, chilled political debates, supression of even discussions about encryption algorithms, and forcing the removal of entire websites without sending so much as a sniff past a judge are things that would probably leave Jefferson et.al. spinning in their graves.
From the article:
Re:no copyrights... no NYT registration (Score:3, Funny)
If there were no copyrights, you can bet the NYT would not be putting content on the Internat unless it was protected with DRM.
If there were no copyrights, there wouldn't be any DR to M.
Re:no copyrights... no NYT registration (Score:5, Informative)
You don't have to register with the NYT.
With the following procedure, you can read any NYT article:
I suspect this works because the NYT sees google as the referrer.
Re:no copyrights... no NYT registration (Score:2)
Re:no copyrights... no NYT registration (Score:2)
Yes, but those tend to get weeded outed pretty fast once they're in the open. :)
Prepare to create a new account for the NYT any day now
Re:no copyrights... no NYT registration (Score:4, Informative)
There is no dark evil purpose in this. The reason is circulation. Newspapers include online views in their circulation numbers so that they can charge more per ad. However, advertisers got keen to this and realized that online statistics were almost always inflated (does it count refreshes? does it count each graphic as a separate hit? does it count the same ip viewing different articles as seperate hits? the list goes on.) As a result, the NY Times has instituted this so that they can better gauge the number of readers of their online paper.
There is no secret Orwellian doctrine at the NY Times. You can take off your tin foil hats now.
Re:Its a conspiracy (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Its a conspiracy (Score:2)
Re:Its a conspiracy (Score:2)
"Copy left" (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not a big fan of copyleft as an ideology, but intentionally mispelling it as "copy left" is a spin if I've ever seen one.
I was going to post the same thing, but the parent got it right first.
bitch bitch bitch (Score:2, Insightful)
If you're so opposed to registering at websites, why the fuck do you have a slashdot account?
Advert on the page (Score:2, Funny)
And yes, I did read the article .. mostly ..
Re:What ?!! (Score:5, Informative)
Ging-gang-google gave me this article [umkc.edu] from the website of the school of Law at UKMC.
Apparently what happened was that the American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers (ASCAP) sent letters out in 1996 to camps - including Girl Scout ones - demanding they pay fees for singing any of their copyrighted songs (such as Edelweiss and Puff the Magic Dragon), saying, "They buy paper, twine and glue for their crafts - they can pay for the music, too. If offenders keep singing without paying, we will sue them if necessary."
Later they claimed that they hadn't meant to target Girl Scouts, just other camps - "the sort that bring in bands for square dances, have music by the pool ... and are like sending your kid to a resort."
Re:YOU can change the copyright laws (Score:4, Insightful)
What would be good is this:
a) Copyright ends at death of author (not copyright holder), that's it. "But what about the kids?" They already got the advantage - genes with creative talent, and possibly a famous pedigree. We want to make sure that they use them.
b) Every copyright is doubled. There is an author's copyright and a market copyright. The author of a work starts with both. The market copyright can be freely sold, transferred, etc. The author's copyright CANNOT be transferred from the author BY ANY MEANS. Thus, authors can still sell copyright rights if they want to, but cannot be forced to give up rights on their own work - they always have author's copyright.
c) Legislate the creation of legal deprotection agencies. These agencies will remove copy protection measures from works once they have confirmed that they are not being used for illegal purposes. (This is not illegal under the DMCA! The DMCA makes it impossible by banning the distribution of the tools and information that would be needed to do so, but doesn't make it illegal.)
d) Ban advertising and nationalise retail. Again super harsh. But, sadly, it is now the *ONLY* way to prevent the commercial market becoming inevitably dominated by the existing big distributors.