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Lessig Legal Team Needs Your Copyright Stories 361

Posted by timothy from the widespread-availability dept.
Joe Gratz writes "Lawrence Lessig and his legal team are asking for your help. Kahle v. Ashcroft is a lawsuit that challenges changes to U.S. copyright law that have created a large class of 'orphan works' -- creative works which are out of print and no longer commercially available, but which are still regulated by copyright. To win the lawsuit, we need more examples of people being burdened by these copyright-related barriers to the use of orphan works. Visit the Kahle Submission Site and tell us your story."
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Lessig Legal Team Needs Your Copyright Stories More

Lessig Legal Team Needs Your Copyright Stories

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  • Does not being able to play old games count? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by foidulus ( 743482 ) * on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:03PM (#9436755)
    as being "burdened"? There were a lot of fun games way back in the day that are now abandonware, but since they are copyrighted you really can't do much about them. Either you can't find them anymore, or if you can find them(and pay an arm and a leg for them on eBay) you usually have to keep old hardware laying around to play them.
    • Your pursuit of happiness is is referred to as an "unalienable right" of the people in the United States' Declaration of Independence.

      Has your happiness been alienated? Hell yes.

    • This is an excellent point. I think it could also be applied to software useful to students, like development tools. My alma mater used to teach programming with Turbo Pascal 7. Students usually asked for a copy to install it at home, and of course we couldn't oblige, even though Borland had stopped selling TP7 for quite a while (late 90's).

      However...

      you usually have to keep old hardware laying around to play them.

      IMO this is a different argument and seems to imply that companies should give out source

    • The argument on old hardware is unrelated to this story, though ?

      Unless you're proposing that not only should copyright for the title be dropped - its source code should also be made available so that it can be adjusted to work on current hardware and future hardware to come.

      For what it's worth... you don't always have to go to e-bay either. Try Abandonware sites first. Most of the titles they carry will be in muddy legal waters, but some have been officially put available by those who carry the rights.
      Th
      • > Try Abandonware sites first. Most of the titles they carry will be in
        > muddy legal waters

        That is the point to this exercize.. To un-muddy the water and make this perfectly legal.

        Also
        > The argument on old hardware is unrelated to this story, though ?

        Yes, thats why he only mentioned games (This is called software)
        Hardware can be emulated.

      • Unless you're proposing that not only should copyright for the title be dropped - its source code should also be made available so that it can be adjusted to work on current hardware and future hardware to come.
        Not necessary. Emulators can take care of this in the same way that they are extensively used for old arcade games (which are another example).
    • Wouldn't all NES/SNES games fit into this category ? Double Dragon, Final Fantasy, etc. etc... The only way to play them is on an emulator, which is illegal, I think.
      • Well, final fantasy has been re-released on the ps2(and in Japan on the wonderswan color and now IIRC gameboy advance). I really think the companies should embrace roms, ie sell them for a few bucks a pop. Almost no overhead, pure profit, and I would gladly agree to pay $2 a piece or so if it was possible(also makes it a lot more conveint). Just look at iTunes.
        Hell, while they are at its, they should release an SDK for some of these older machines that will allow you to use it for free for non-commecia
    • Yes, if someone contacted the company and they refused to issue a license under any terms. I know I've heard of this happening, but I can't remember which companies pulled that kind of B/S. From the page: "You can help us if you have ever wanted to copy, distribute, perform, modify, sample, mash-up, or generally use an orphan work, but were prevented from doing so because: [...] You were able to find the copyright holder and they refused to issue a license"

    • Sorcerers Get All The Girls (Score:4, Insightful)

      by mangu ( 126918 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:46PM (#9437086)
      I tried to reinstall it, after 12 years. One of the disks was unreadable. I wrote to the manufacturer. They told me they didn't sell it anymore. Got it from a warez site. Fuck the law. As the Romans said, non omne licitum honestum, i.e. "not everything that's legal is honest". Or, as Heilein's professor Bernardo de la Paz said in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress":

      "But I will accept any rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; If I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am responsible for everything I do."
    • Another obvious answer: 90% of all books published after 1921. 80% of the comics published during the same period. 70% of all movies released during the same period.

    • "Greatest Generation"'s literature being wiped out (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Simonetta ( 207550 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:57PM (#9437160)
      One effect of this idiotic law is the wholesale destruction of nearly all of the popular books from the first half of the 20th century. The very best stuff and well-known titles are still being published and read (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, Raymond Chandler) but past a hundred or so titles, the books are just disappearing.
      When the paper wears out or the book stops being checked out, libraries take the title off the shelf. Large cites will sometimes save a copy in the stacks, but usually the books get pulped or burned. In a technologically advanced civilized society, each title that is worth being published in the first place would be scanned and OCR'ed before being completely wiped out. But this is illegal under the Mickey-Mouse-protection-to-infinity US copyright law. So they just get pulped and burned.

      I read a book by Florence King about how white people got to be so weird (a sort of laid-back but sharp quasi-anthropological study of Caucasians in North America) "WASP, where is thy sting?". In this book, she cites many of the books that were influencial on her and her parents thoughts and attitudes when she was growing up in the 1940's. It is impossible to find any of them now even though they were read and enjoyed by tens of millions of people and had a great deal of influence on how the depression generation came to view the world.

      Now the rock'n'roll generation (the baby boomers) and the MTV generation and Kazaa generations would just say 'Fuck this stupid law' and then OCR and circulate their favorite books and videos anyway. But the WWII generation won't, they'll trust that the proper authorities are taking care of the preservation of their culture. But that is not happening and their entire culture except for about 100 titles is just evaporating.

      Hundreds of years from now, people will marvel at the American empire and technological accomplishments from the end of World War II. They will wonder at what these people were like; what they believed; how they interacted with each other; what drove them. But they will never know because all the popular literature from this period is being destroyed and not copied as its media wears out.

      It's all happening because of this insane US copyright law. And nobody seems to be aware that it's happening.

      Sure, there's a copy of every book published in the US in the Library of Congress. Maybe. One copy. Somewhere in the vast warehouse stacks. But with the current ability to fit tens of thousands of titles on a single 89 cent DVD-R there's no excuse for allowing all of the popular books from the early and mid-20th century to disappear. Future generations will not think well of us for allowing this to just happen. Just because nitwit assholes like Michael Eisner have hundreds of millions of dollars doesn't give them the right to destroy the entire culture of generations.

      • Re:"Greatest Generation"'s literature being wiped (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Tony-A ( 29931 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @08:26PM (#9437404)
        Well said.

        I would like to add that this also does a disservice to the memory of the creators of the works. Copyright seems to be working to insure the anihilation of their memory.
        An extreme comparison, but imagine taking the graveyards of your ancestors, destroying the headstones, and putting up some parking lots. I don't particularly care about gravestones and ancestors, but that seems somehow very wrong.
      • Maybe this is what Copyright law and the DMCA is really about. Namely, the destruction of the culture of our ancestors so that it can be replaced with the anaesthetizing culture that suits the current political establishment, such as, the current crop of movies being pumped out of Hollywood, poisoning the minds of an entire generation.

      • Sure, there's a copy of every book published in the US in the Library of Congress. Maybe. One copy.

        The Library of Congress used to receive a copy of each new copyrighted work, but that stopped with the enactment of the Copyright Act of 1976. The librarian of Congress made the point, with examples, that McDonald's (among other businesses) was copyrighting their tray liners, and dutifully submitting one copy of each to the Library of Congress. This wasn't, according to the librarians, quite what Jefferson

        • For registering a copyright it's still a requirement to submit copies to the LoC. For published works, this must be "two copies of the best edition." Parent was talking about books not tray liners. It's safe to assume that the copyright was indeed registered for published books.

          And if McD's wants to register the copyright on its tray liners, it does too have to submit a copy. At least according to the Copyright Office [copyright.gov].

    • The terms happiness and property were switched (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Towards the end of the writing of the declaration, happiness was inserted instead of the original thought of property, taken from Lockes works. It was still intended to assume property as one of the "happiness" things. Lockes writings are part of the "natural law" ideals that took hold in merre olde englande, and greatly influenced Jefferson, the primary draftsman of the Declaration. The natural laws ideals were intended primarily to protect generic "mankind" against the natural state of government-which al

  • How 'bout... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The U2 single by Negativland! I am burdened by its lack of availability!

    Seriously, they are probably looking for a work which over which there has never been a legal firestorm, and which can easily be demonstrated to have a demonstrable value (or the lack can have a demonstrable negative value). Censored music and software abandonware need not apply--sorry Slashdotters!
    • 'Censored music and software abandonware need not apply',
      Why not,
      I've had a number of CD/vinal stolen in my time and have had to resort to possibly ileagal distribution methods to be able to listen to them,
      since:
      a) I don't know where my copy is.
      b) I can't get a copy from anyone because they won't do a run of one out of print piece of vinal.

      This to me has been no great loss, but I'm sure there are people who have lost more valuable copyright materials due to fire or thieft.

      The only time I have ever wanted

    • Re:How 'bout... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by surprise_audit ( 575743 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @08:43PM (#9437519)
      How about all the old songs that are owned by the record labels instead of by the artists that wrote and performed them? They're not exactly censored, but the labels hold the copyrights and can effectively make an artist disappear by simply not publishing albums. Janis Ian has this to say on her website:

      And for those of us with major label contracts who want some of our music available for free downloading... well, the record companies own our masters, our outtakes, even our demos, and they won't allow it. Furthermore, they own our voices for the duration of the contract, so we can't even post a live track for downloading!

      She says that specifically in regard to downloading, but the same applies to out-of-print tracks.

  • Counterargument (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Short Circuit ( 52384 ) <mikemol@gmail.com> on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:06PM (#9436773) Homepage Journal
    Sometimes a company may cease distributing a product because they want to focus consumer attention on their new offerings.

    However, I definately support returning the ownership of IP to the employees that authored it...assuming their employer went out of business.

    On a more speculative note, it'd be interesting to see a system where patents and copyrights had to be in the name of individuals, and ownership of that material followed the individual wherever he went.
    • Sorry, but that wouldn't work. Assign all copyrights/patents to the legal representative, and then make the legal rep contractually obligated to reassign everything over to the new legal rep when the old one leaves. Or even simpler: make employees contractually obligated to assign copyright back to another individual in the company when he/she leaves. Is it somewhat oppressive? Yes. Don't like it? Don't work there. Simple. OT: It's definitely, not definately.

    • Re:Counterargument (Score:5, Interesting)

      by pod ( 1103 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:18PM (#9436877) Homepage
      Or may want to raise the value or appeal of the product.

      I don't know if this qualifies, but look at the back catalogue of just about any music act that dates back to the beginnings of CDs. Soooo much stuff is out of print now, and you can't buy it at any price from anywhere. I mean, don't know if that's a 'burden', but it's certainly a pain in the ass to have to track down and download all the stuff I can't pay for anymore. You'd think if there's money to be made re-releasing ancient material the labels would be all over that in an instance (hey, money out of thin air!) but not so.

    • Re:Counterargument (Score:4, Interesting)

      by jwthompson2 ( 749521 ) * on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:25PM (#9436937) Homepage
      But this would require reworking the general principles of corporate law because we currently treat corporations as individuals; allowing them to own property and work in ways they otherwise would not be able to if not treated as a legally autonomous entity, and employees thus become agents of the corporation producing on its behalf. You speculative note is ill-concieved because it would destroy the abilities of corporations to function effectively. A better yet just as speculative idea would be to abolish the idea of being able to own an idea, instead allow ownership of implementations, processes and ways of doing things should not be ownable; but a specific method of doing something might be worth allowing people to own; unless you are one of those millitant 'free software' folks who vehemently oppose all kinds of IP ownership...
      • psychologist friend of mine recently pointed out that treating a corporation as a 'person' might open them to other possibilities ... in fact he pointed out that if you look at the behaviour of modern corporations and analyze them using the normal psychological diagnostic criteria (DMS-III) the diagnosis 'psychopath' often comes out ....

    • Strategic Marketing (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Detritus ( 11846 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @08:37PM (#9437472) Homepage
      One of Microsoft's bad habits is the way they develop a product in response to a perceived threat, market the product until the threat is neutralized, and then discontinue the product. The result is a gaping hole in the marketplace where Microsoft nuked a competitor.

      I've seen other companies buy a competing product just so they can kill it.

      Should copyright law be used as a tool to suppress information? What if I am a rich, but terrible, writer of fantasy epics. Should I be able to buy the copyrights to the Lord of the Rings, and then prohibit anyone from printing the books?

      • Re:Strategic Marketing (Score:4, Informative)

        by 1u3hr ( 530656 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @09:42PM (#9437953)
        I've seen other companies buy a competing product just so they can kill it.

        Adobe did this to a lot of font software, notably Ares. There was FontMonger (a font editor and converter), Chameleon (produced vaiations on a font), FontFiddler (kerning), FontMinder (organising). They apparently took some of the technology to use in their other products, then simply took them off the market. Most of these still work well, 12 years later, on current Windows, in spite of Adobe claiming they were unmaintainable. You can only find Warez versions now.

  • Sometimes comercial unavailability is not a burden, but a blessing.

  • Photos (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Ms.XingTianCai ( 785422 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:06PM (#9436783)
    I do this for a living, photography printing and scanning. I have a very hard time telling people that I can't copy a picture because it isn't 75 years old yet. This stands true for any picture taken by a company that is still in business regardless of whether they are even able to make reprints anymore! Now with the digital age the copyright has been quoted to me as 100 years from the date of creation.

    • Re:Photos (Score:5, Interesting)

      by kai5263499 ( 751741 ) <kai@nOsPAm.werxltd.com> on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:32PM (#9436991) Homepage
      I love photographers who are so bent on the copyright of the image that they never stop to grasp what the image actually represents.

      My fiencee's close uncle recently died and I was asked to create a video memorial (basically a video slideshow), most of the pictures I scanned and put on the DVD were professionally taken and supposedly copyrighted.

      When a copyright restricts my right to do what I will with my (or my relative's, friend's, anyone else's) memories, that copyright is no longer valid.

      • Re:Photos (Score:3, Insightful)

        by MrNixon ( 28945 )
        Mostly, photographers are so concerned with copyright because they <i>like to eat</i>.

        Their work is their sole source of income, and reprints tend to be a significant part of their income. The law has provided them with a mechanism to protect their rights, and they use it so they can provide for themselves and their families.

        They all appreciate that their work can mean a great deal to their customers, but in the end they have to look out for themselves - if they were too nice with their copyri

        • Re:Photos (Score:3, Insightful)

          by rhysweatherley ( 193588 )
          Mostly, photographers are so concerned with copyright because they like to eat.

          Rubbish. Photographers already have the "I must eat" angle well and truly covered. They do quite well from charging for their time at studio sittings, "glamour" shoots, weddings, etc.

          The amount of money that they make from these is far more than they could ever collect in royalties on family portraits and wedding photos exchanged via e-mail.

          Only a very small number of photos ever reach iconic status within a culture. Th

          • Re:Photos (Score:2, Interesting)

            by Halfbaked Plan ( 769830 )
            Well, pitting yourself against the photographers is a losing strategy.

            I have a professional photographer friend. I go to a lot of auctions and recently bought a large quantity of color slides at an estate auction. There are many, many historically significant slides in the collection, i.e. the man who shot them travelled quite a bit (i.e. Sarejevo in the 1960's). My photographer friend told me that since I own the only copies of the slides, I own the copyright on them. He's not a crackpot, btw, he's so

      • Re:Photos (Score:5, Insightful)

        by King_TJ ( 85913 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @08:03PM (#9437221) Journal
        Wow! A sensible comment! I've recently run into several photographers while doing on-site PC service and support, and got into debates with 2 of them about this sort of thing. As far as I'm concerned, no matter which photography company claims exclusive "rights" to a photo of a person, that person or their immediate family and relatives should have rights that superceed all others.

        This seems to become a sticky issue with most commercial photographers, especially when it comes to wedding photos. But as far as I'm concerned, they need to change their whole business model. Instead of the structure they claim to use (where the money isn't made off taking the initial photos, but only on the prints and reprints ordered later) - I say, just charge up front for your time to take the photos! Quit trying to use copyright law as leverage to collect money later on the reprints.

        Surely, copyright law was never envisioned to be used in such a manner, preventing people from reproducing images of their OWN FACES (or their loved one's faces), just because those images were originally captured using someone else's camera and film.

        I've always viewed photography as a service one performs. Anyone can buy a camera and take pictures. It's not rocket science. But photographers get hired mainly for the convenience, plus the understanding that they happen to be "better than the average person" at getting good photos. It seems most commercial photographers, however, are more caught up in the idea of reproducing and reselling prints from their stash of archived images. That's not what the whole profession should really be about!
        • We went with a professional for our wedding, got an initial set of photos, and six months down the line want some additional copies. The "professional" had lost the originals. No more copies. He lost some money, we lost more.

        • Re:Photos (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2004 @08:04AM (#9440868) Homepage
          his is one reasonwhy Iget 10X the business than other videographers in my area.

          Iprint boldly on my quotation... "You own the contents of this DVD 100%. it is your responsibility and your liability... ask everyone else that quoted you if they also release all rights to you."

          even when I am 10-20% over the price of the other guys... I get the job because I choose to not be an asshole and steal these people's property by asserting copyright.
        • I was thrilled then the photographer [garyirving.com] my wife and I picked for our wedding told us that we keep the negatives. He said, "the pictures are ours, we're just paying him for the use of his camera and his eyes for that day." The fact that he takes fantastic photos made it even better. :)

      • Re:Photos (Score:5, Insightful)

        by teamhasnoi ( 554944 ) <teamhasnoi@yahoo. c o m> on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @08:10PM (#9437276) Journal
        I don't think that that is the point - what person *wants* to deny someone else use of a photo that has been in the family for years?

        Ignoring the law is not acceptable - you can still be fucked over by some over-zealous photographer, abandoned game/software publisher, author, or anyone else with a point to make or a bone to pick.

        That's why overturning our current copyright length is important! I just looked through an old copy of the 'Golden Book Encyclopedia' (illustrated, for kids) from 1959 and happened to look up copyright. It says, "To get a copyright in the United States the writer or publisher must send two copies of the work to the Copyright Office in Washington DC. He must also pay a small fee. The copyright he gets is good for 28 years. At the end of theat time it may be renewed for another 28 years. (that's 56 years) That means that the encyclopedia would have gone to public domain in another 14 years. 2018.

        In 1976 congress extended copyright retroactivley to 75 years. The Sonny Bono Act in 98 extended it another 20. Now this same encyclopedia won't be put into Public Domain until 2054. After you are dead. And other people are wondering how in a DRM-filled world they are going to 'preserve' your memories.

        IOW, go after those who are effectively making copyright last forever - your congresswhores. They are the ones who are 'ignoring' your feelings. Photographers, authors, coders, musicians etc. are only going to utilize what they have; if © lasts forever - they'll take advantage of it.

        Congress needs to be reminded of the original intention of copyright - to give the author of a work LIMITED time to use it.

        That would be your job.

      • I had a similar situation where a grandmother died and we wanted to make copies of a nice photo we had of both grandparents together. All we had of it was a proof though, and nobody we talked to was willing to enlarge it.

        It wasn't that we were cheapskates or cheats, we just had no idea who took the original photo. I wound up just scanning it and getting regular prints made from the scanned image. It's technically a copyright violation, but I think I can live with it...

    • Re:Photos (Score:2, Interesting)

      by pangu ( 322010 )
      My father recently tried to get my grandparents wedding photos reproduced as a gift on their 63rd anniversary. Regular photography places wouldn't do it. Fortunately, as an art professor, my father has students who were willing to reproduce the photos as part of an art project.

  • One question (Score:2, Insightful)

    by sploo22 ( 748838 )
    If they don't have evidence that it's causing a problem, why are they starting a lawsuit?

    From the website:
    Browse Submitted Stories
    None submitted yet.

    Am I misunderstanding this, or are these people just being trolls?

  • Abandoned text and other works.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by loose electron ( 699583 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:09PM (#9436796) Homepage
    Hmmm - There are a good many "niche publications" out there that it is no longer possible to find the author for... Less so in mainsteam works however.

    Lots of specialized technical documents are in this category. However, people generally don't challenge the copyright of something obscure like that.

    I ask the question what is this group looking for? What motivates this case? SInce it is a legal group, they are motivated by money, so I would want to know more about why they are truly doiong this before I would support this effort.

    Can anyone "follow the money" and find why this is being done?

    • Re:Abandoned text and other works.. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      SInce it is a legal group, they are motivated by money, so I would want to know more about why they are truly doiong this before I would support this effort.

      That's like saying, "Since you're a programmer you're obviously only interested in making money on your programs, just like Microsoft and other companies do." In fact, some programmers like sharing their code for free. (Perhaps you've heard of the GPL?)

      Similarly, some lawyers take on cases because it's the right thing to do. They often lose mon
    • Last year, Lessig helped set up the case challenging the extension of copyrights in the US (cannot remember the case name for the life of me). He talked with experts on the Supreme Court, who advised him to concentrate on stories of people who were harmed by the law. Lessig instead set up a logical argument based on constitutional precedent, and his side lost the case. He's not making that mistake again.

  • happy birthday (Score:5, Insightful)

    by roadrash608 ( 542600 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:16PM (#9436864)
    While you're at it, write your congressperson and ask them what year you will be able to perform "Happy Birthday" in public without paying royalties or getting sued.
    • IANAL, but... I think that it is legal to perform music that has been recorded on any label. I think I could grab my guitar, sell tickets, and perform my version of any song without risk of legal problems. Isn't that what 'tribute' shows are about?

      .:diatonic:.

      • Re:happy birthday (Score:3, Informative)

        by EvanED ( 569694 )
        No, it isn't. The Girl Scouts of America were sued (or at least got cease and desist orders) a couple years ago for singing it around campfires. The copyright holders only backed off once they were getting blasted from every direction. This is also why if you go to a restaurant, just about no one sings happy birthday, they are always some cheesy other song.
        • The staff in a resturant would be engaging in a commercial performance of the song. There is not an 'enforcer' in each resturant who prohibits the patrons from singing whatever song they want at their table.

          This is the stuff Urban Legends are made out of.
      • Those tribute shows pay royalties to the owners of the public performance rights.

  • My example (Score:5, Informative)

    by Fished ( 574624 ) <amphigory@@@gmail...com> on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:18PM (#9436879)
    Something to bear in mind folks: the court will likely be much more impressed with "significant speech" issues that with games and the like. (I know that many consider games and entertainment to be quite significant - and I agree with them. But the court will be much more impressed with academic, religious, or political examples.) in that vein, here's what I contributed. Not much, but the best I've got. Beginning Intermediate Grammar of Hellenistic Greek originally submitted by Patrick Narkinsky: This work is a frankly revolutionary New Testament Greek Grammar published in the 70's. It has been out of print for many years, but is still widely appreciated. I spent the past several years trying to locate a copy to buy at any reasonable price. (A copy on Ebay recently went for $222). The publisher is not interested in republishing it. However, very recently they have allowed that if someone else paid to transfer it to a modern computerized format (Unicode/MSWORD) they would consider making it available on their own terms. The value of this grammar is such that a number of people are working on it, but requiring us to convert the work to their format so that they'll distribute is a pretty onerous version. There are certainly many other Greek students who would be willing to contribute their stories on this work. Stifled uses Patrick Narkinsky: First, read it. Second, have it on hand as a reference. It contains revolutionary ideas on the categorization of BIblical Greek that are simply unavailable elsewhere.

  • Hey Scott Rubin! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by epsalon ( 518482 ) *
    No need to find original Scorched Earth source code [notabug.com], because there's xscorch [xscorch.org], the free software clone.
  • by John Kerry, out of print, used ones are between $420 and $1200 on Amazon.com...

  • Hmmm (Score:2)

    by LS ( 57954 )
    So does this mean that if you're a hermit author, then anyone can copy your stuff because you aren't selling it on Amazon? That doesn't seem fair. Or am I misunderstanding this?

    LS

    • Re:Hmmm (Score:3, Insightful)

      by An Onerous Coward ( 222037 )
      If your book went out of print fifty years ago, and you've done absolutely nothing since to make your continued interest in the work known, hell yes.

      Lessig generally comes up with good plans for this sort of thing. He's not going to demand that every work not currently being printed be released into the public domain. That's just crazy. Instead, he's probably proposing some sort of notification system where, every other decade or so, an author has to fill out some short form to notify the Copyright

  • Good Luck (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hchaos ( 683337 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:40PM (#9437047)

    But I seriously doubt this case has any merit from the POV of a judge (yes, I did RTFA). Free speech simply does not apply to using someone else's copyrighted work, and the U.S. Congress has the Constitutional authority to make copyright laws. The laws may be burdensome and unfair, but that's Congress's responsibilty, not the courts, and if you've studied the recent history of the Supreme Court, you know that they're not going to interfere with something that is indisputably within Congress's authority under the Constitution, regardless of its burden on society, because the court does not make laws, it simply interprets them.

    The resources spent on this would be far better spent on other courses of action, like lobbying or a public education campaign. This is just expensive windmill-tilting.

    • It's there in the Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, paragraph 8: "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". So, if the laws do not promote the progress of science and useful arts, they are unconstitutional. Hmmm, did you note that "useful" thing about arts? Suppose someone argues that computer games are useless?...
    • Lessig himself is a lawyer, and as proactive as he is, he doesn't strike me as the type to file a hail Mary lawsuit.

      My guess is that he's going to take up the same general argument that he did in Eldred vs. Ashcroft: Since the Constitution explicitly states that Congress is supposed to use copyright to "promote the arts and sciences," and having dead works locked up where they cannot benefit the creator or the public does nothing to achieve this aim, he'll ask the court to declare the current laws unc
      • Lessig himself is a lawyer, and as proactive as he is, he doesn't strike me as the type to file a hail Mary lawsuit.

        The Eldred lawsuit was a long shot. This looks like an even longer shot.

  • Lawrence Lessig (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mcrbids ( 148650 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:43PM (#9437060) Journal
    This guy's name just keeps coming up, over and over.

    You have to hand it to this guy - he doesn't give up on *anything*.

    How much better this world would be if there were more like Lawrence!

  • Don't forget orphaned movies and televsion shows (Score:5, Interesting)

    by g00z ( 81380 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:54PM (#9437141) Homepage
    Everybody seems to be focused on video games and music around here, but let's not forget one of the biggest areas where copyright becomes a serious problem with orphaned works -- television and movies. I bet each person in here could name at least 5-10 movies and 5-10 television shows that's they would love to be able to see again, but can't because the companies that own the copyrights to those works refuse to release them on video/dvd or air them again. So why is it illegal to buy or sell fan made copies of such works if there is no other means to acquire or view them?

    Obviously most of these things aren't in print because a lack of substantial demand for them, but lets consider that some of the films that are acclaimed for their worth in terms of art are also those that are the least popular among the consumer masses. Wouldn't it be fantastic if none of us could legally view "Casablanca" anymore because Viacom decided it doesn't sell well enough, but still held onto the copyright so nobody could watch it again?

    I would name some movies and shows I'd love to see released again, but I'm sure I'd get laughed at. I have some pretty low-brow tastes :)

  • Erle Stanley Gardner (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mangu ( 126918 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:58PM (#9437169)
    At one time he was the most read mistery author in the world. Today, of nearly a hundred books he wrote, no more than five or so are in print, and all from the "Perry Mason" series. No "DA" books from Gardner anywhere.

  • Sad tale of orphaned silent movies (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @07:59PM (#9437179)
    The copyright extension has devastated the preservation of movies from the 1920s and earlier. One famous distributor of silent movies on video has gone out of business [grapevinevideo.com]. Previously, many small mom and pop business would preserve 1920s films and transfer them to video for resale.

    No one got rich, yet it enabled the private sector to fund preservation through the resale of videos of long out of print materials. The output of famous movies stars like Clara Bow [imdb.com] (the "It" girl) and Colleen Moore [imdb.com] is becoming almost completely unavailable to the average person unable to arrange a private screening with the an archive.

    It is no accident the the copyright law was pushed through to make 1923 the cut-off year. After 1924 movies became more "modern" in quality of camera and film, and adaptation of the standard speed of 24 frames per second. Also after 1924 phonograph recordings began to use the new electronic recording techniques which allowed for higher fidelity and sound quality compared to the old acoustic recordings.

    The saddest part about the films is that the owners of the copyrights have no interest in preserving them. These movies are literally dissolving into dust as the nitrate based film stock decomposes. Copyright extension has been a complete disaster with respect the preservation of film and early sound recordings.

  • There's got to be skads of stories out there about people trying to reprint out-of-print magazines and fiction by deceased novelists (or books from now-defunct publishers).

  • Accedemic Works (Score:4, Interesting)

    by IAmElvis ( 788579 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @08:00PM (#9437187)
    I've taken many philosophy classes where the prof. has had to hand out inch thick stacks of photocopies because the work is out of print. If someone really wanted to, they could get them in trouble for this. Along the same lines, the Kemp-Smith translation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason was out of print the last time I checked. It is THE definitive translation which is refered to in all the literature. One pretty much can't study Kant without it.
    • There are different rules for making copies for a class -- copyright's fair use clause gives a lot of leeway to making copies for educational purposes. I don't know, without more information, if what you're talking about exceeds fair use or not. If entire books are being photocopied, that likely is illegal without permission. If it's individual chapters or essays, that could well be OK.

  • Two sides to every story... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sixpaw ( 648825 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @08:01PM (#9437194)
    While I appreciate the urge to free orphaned works, I'm not entirely comfortable with the approach suggested by this case, either; in particular, the authors suggest a 'nominal' fee and a manditory registration process for copyrighting works. A $1 or $5 fee might not sound like much, but a $50 or $100 fee is equally plausible (consider patent and trademark fees!) and would make it difficult for small-market creators (e.g. photographers) to protect their works.

    What's more, even a $1 fee -- or a no-fee registration process -- can be unduly burdensome: imagine creating, for instance, a Half-Life 2 FAQ for the web and posting it up on Usenet. Under their proposed system as I read it, unless you go to the trouble of filling out the copyright registration for your FAQ there would be nothing to prevent a company like Brady Games from coming along and publishing your FAQ unattributed in their Official Half-Life 2 Guide(tm). For large works like a FAQ it may be reasonable to perform registration, but do you really want to have to go to the trouble to make sure that every Usenet and Slashdot post you make won't be reprinted for profit by someone else?

    It's worth remembering that "copyright" refers not just to consumers' rights but also to creators' -- the right to say who can copy your original material and for what purposes. These are your rights too.

    • Re:Two sides to every story... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      For large works like a FAQ it may be reasonable to perform registration, but do you really want to have to go to the trouble to make sure that every Usenet and Slashdot post you make won't be reprinted for profit by someone else?
      1. You overestimate the value of your Usenet and Slashdot posts
      2. Once you get over yourself you will realize that this is exactly why this is good. The very idea that every little turd that falls out of your (or anyone else's) ass is entitled to the full protection of the governm

  • This will NOT make out of print IP public domain.. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Granos ( 746051 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @08:03PM (#9437213)
    The summary is a bit misleading. It seems to imply that (if the lawsuit succeeds) if a work goes out of print, it will become public domain. This is not the case. The only thing that this lawsuit is aiming to do is to declare the three major copyright acts passed since 1976 unconsitutional, and basically revert back to the copyright law that existed in the US from 1790 to 1976. Basically, you would need to register works with the copyright office, renew them every so often, and keep records of all works that you have copyrighted. The copyright term would also be shortened significantly.

    For big companies, keeping up with copyrights would be no big deal (although many would have a fuss about the shortening of the term, like say, Disney). That's why this talk about implications in video games is so silly. First of all, the oldest playable videogames are only about 20 years old, which is well under the copyright term, even with the old laws. Second, most videogame companies are still around, or have been bought out by other companies, in which case the copyrights would be inhereted. The fact that these games can't be bought commercially anymore doesn't mean anything, the companies would still own the copyrights, and the games would not be public domain.

    The other thing to note is that any changes to copyright law are NOT going to be applied retroactively. The courts aren't going to say "Well, you didn't have to file for a copyright or keep copyright records after 1976 in order to legally have a copyright, but you should have been able to see into the future and see that these laws are unconstitutional, and done it anyways." It's impossible to say how many of the works people are talking about would still be under copyright if the recent laws had never been passed. It's theoretically possible that every work someone submits a story about would be under copyright if the new copyright laws had never been passed, and that they didn't file for a copyright simply because the new laws made it so that they didn't need to. That's why the courts aren't just going to say "Every work published from 1976 to now is public domain!"

    • Re:This will NOT make out of print IP public domai (Score:4, Interesting)

      by PipianJ ( 574459 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @09:07PM (#9437690)

      The other thing to note is that any changes to copyright law are NOT going to be applied retroactively.

      I find that odd, as they certainly passed the extensions retroactively. I always thought that the way to go about fixing (parts of) the copyright problem was to attack the 1976 and Bono laws as ex post facto laws, which are expressly forbidden by the Constitution.

  • Disney (Score:4, Interesting)

    by nick_davison ( 217681 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @08:10PM (#9437271)
    Disney outright uses it as a marketing ploy:

    "Buy X now! Available for the last time ever on video!"

    They deliberately orphan older movies to force consumers [who may not want to buy them just yet but equally don't want to never be able to buy them] to purchase them in a given format.

    Mind you, using Disney as an example might not be the best move as they can (and do) buy better/more politicians.

  • How about binary code? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mangu ( 126918 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @08:16PM (#9437338)
    The Constitution states that the purpose of patents and copyrights is "to promote the progress of science and useful arts". Well, I can understand that books do serve this purpose. But how exactly does binary executable software promote this progress? If the source code remains a trade secret, it will be lost forever after the company no longer exists. And copy-protected works? They will disappear if the devices needed to play them are no longer available. So, the logical thing, would be to declare inconstitutional any sort of DRM on copyrighted works. Trade secrets need no copyright protection, they have their own protection in the secret. Copyrights, like patents, are an incentive for people to reveal how their creation works, not a license to get profits from secrets.

  • Kudos to Red Hat (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DdJ ( 10790 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @08:30PM (#9437428) Homepage Journal
    I was wondering if the old credit card processing software my startup company wrote, most recently owned by Red Hat, was still available for download to users who already had license keys. No new license keys will ever be available, but for users who already had them, it's conceivable that they'd need to redownload the software if their credit card processing server crashed, or if they migrated operating systems (for example from SCO, which we did support, to Linux).

    So, I wandered over to Red Hat's anonymous FTP server, and there it was -- a piece of closed-source software that the company hasn't supported since 2001 is still available for download at the same location it was at when it was a supported product.

    Kudos to Red Hat for this. There's an extremely slim chance that some ex-customer could have been screwed if this closed-source copyrighted software had been removed from their download servers, but it hasn't been. It's still there. I applaud them.

    (And it's not Red Hat's fault it was closed source. The NDAs that the banks and credit card companies required pretty much gave no other options to anybody who tried to do this sort of thing in a legit manner. There were pseudo-open-source efforts to do similar stuff, but none of them had the approval of the banks, and as far as I know they actually violated the terms the banks set for using their merchant accounts.)

    (By the way, if anyone at Red Hat sees this message -- I'd love to re-obtain the rights to that old source code. To some extent I'm screwed by the copyright on the thing's source code. I've signed the NDAs, but I can't get my own source code back, even though I'd like to continue fixing bugs and updating clearing house compliance for free. But the customers were not screwed, and in the end that's much more important.)

  • a simple solution is... (Score:4, Informative)

    by jonwil ( 467024 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @09:05PM (#9437675)
    Basicly, the copyright holder must either A.make the work available or B.if the work is unavailable to get copies of, they must pay some money to register the work periodicly (how often would depend on the type of work). Each time you register the work, the cost goes up a bit. That way, if someone wants to retain copyright to stuff, they can either make it available ot they can pay to keep the copyright.

    That would mean that for stuff people are still selling/making money off, nothing changes. But for stuff thats not available, if the copyright holder re-registers it (and pays), they get to keep it.

    For works where one cant find the copyright anymore or whatever, one of 3 things would happen;
    1.the copyright holder would make the work available (thus allowing you to get a copy)
    2.the copyright holder would re-register the copyright (thus allowing you to look it up in the database and find out who owns the copyright so you can try to get a copy from them)
    or 3.the work would not be re-regisered (thus meaning it would fall out of copyright and you could copy it)
  • Oh God damn it! I have just released all of my stories as public domain!

  • Copyright protection should not apply when... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Sebby ( 238625 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @09:27PM (#9437834)
    the product is not being made available in a legal way when there is a clear demand for it. Copyright holders should not claim 'lost sales' because of copying of the product, because they didn't 'lose' the sale since they no longer made it available!

    Not making it available when there is a demand is unacceptable, especially given the ease of making works available in digital format now.

  • What about people who want to kill their IP? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nasor ( 690345 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @09:32PM (#9437864)
    Doesn't the owner of a piece of intellectual property have the right to make their property unavailable if they so choose? I realize that most of the examples that have been posted here involve situations where giving widespread access to the 'orphaned' IP wouldn't really hurt anyone, but there are also plenty of cases where a company or individual might want to deliberately make a piece of IP unavailable. If I were a publisher who had recently replaced "The Complete Geek's Guide to Posting on Slashdot" with "The New and Revised Complete Geek's Guide to Posting on Slashdot," I would probably take the original version out of print and wouldn't want it released into the public domain as free competition for my newer product.

    Or what if I just decide that I don't want my book/photo/software/whatever circulating any more? Maybe I had a religious conversion and decided that my IP is no longer fit for use in any decent society, so now I want to bury it. If it's my property, don't I have the right to lock it away?
    • If it's my property, don't I have the right to lock it away?

      Well, you have the right to suppress your work for the copyright term, after which it enters the public domain. But when the copyright term is longer than both your life and the life of most of the people who remember your work and want it redistributed, you are obviously inhibiting fair use.

      A good example from my life is that of my favourite Roger Moore movie 'Wild Geese.' An errant VHS player chewed up my copy a while ago and to get a new VH
    • That's not how copyright works. The point is not to give an author control of his work as some sort of entitlement, it's solely to encourage him to create. The creater does not and should not have the right to "lock away" their IP. If he didn't want people to read it, he shouldn't have written it in the first place!

  • Beautiful example (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bersl2 ( 689221 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @09:44PM (#9437964) Journal
    MST3k

    So who owns it now?

  • Two stories I submitted from the movie world. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jbn-o ( 555068 ) <mail@digitalcitizen.info> on Wednesday June 16, 2004 @01:32AM (#9439281) Homepage
    Both stories come from the directors who spoke after their respective movie was shown at the Roger Ebert Overlooked Film Festival (known better to Champaign and Urbana, Illinois locals as "Ebertfest").

    * Bernard Rose, director of "Paperhouse", had to (and I'm using the term correctly here) steal the reels to this movie after it was shown at Ebertfest a couple of years ago. Sony Classics was unwilling to distribute the movie in formats for home video and Rose wanted more people to see the movie. So he took the reels after it was shown in the Virginia Theatre (a theatre in Champaign, Illinois where the Ebertfest movies are shown).

    * Jonathan Caouette directed "Tarnation" which was made on his computer for what is described as "an initial cost of $187" by the Ebertfest literature. Caouette later discovered that clearing the rights for the snippets of other movies used in Tarnation would cost roughly half a million dollars.

  • Let's Start Over (Score:4, Interesting)

    by PMuse ( 320639 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2004 @08:37AM (#9441155)
    Let us sign a bargain with the devil.

    The devil wants to own certain works, such as the mouse, the Beatles, etc. We want to release forgotten works and future works into the public domain.

    Let us offer to the corporations perpetual copyright on anything they now own. We'll give them a year to make up a grand list of it all. In exchange, we'll demand a reset of the copyright period for new works to something much shorter (like the 1976 version of 33 years + renewal for 33 years). For old works not on the grand list, we'll reset their period according to whatever copyright law existed when they were first published (causing most of them to flow into the public domain immediately).

    How's that for a deal? We give up the mouse forever and they give us back a functional public domain. I'm betting that it won't take long for "the locked works" to be forgotten by all of us.

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