EFF: The Customer Is Always Wrong: A User’s Guide to DRM in Online Music
“This guide ‘translates’ the marketing messages by the major services, giving you the real deal rather than spin.”
Imagine if Tower Records sold you a CD, but then, a few months later, knocked on your door and replaced the CD with one that you can’t play in your car. Would you still feel like you “owned” the CD? Not so much, eh?
The History and Future of the Book: Digital Copyright
Ok, maybe not as bloodthirstingly exciting as a WWF cage match, But pretty close!
On the 14th of April 2005, Cornell University hosted a debate between an EFF staffer (Fred Von Lohmann), a copyfighting academic (Siva Vaidhyanathan), and legal heads of the RIAA (Cary Sherman), MPAA (Fritz Attaway), Napster II (Avery Kotler) and NBC/Universal (Alec French). The three-hour debate raised numerous issues not only to do with peer-to-peer filesharing, but also with the history of expression, with the rights of publishers and distributors, with those of writers and readers, viewers, and listeners, and with the potential futures for digital texts. You can download the whole thing as audio or video.
CNET: In Canada: Cache a page, go to jail?
This is unbelievable! In an effort to get Canada up to speed with the 1996 WIPO copyright treaty (which spawned the extremely flawed DMCA!), the Canadian Parliament has placed on their docket a bill (C-60) that could make it illegal for search engines to cache Web pages, opening the door to frivolous lawsuits and damaging the public’s (or at least internet users’!) access to information.
This is another example of terrible legislation written by the industry that has the most to gain from a draconian copyright law — i.e., record labels and movie studios.
[Thanks to Roy Tennant and Current Cites!]
David M. Berry & Giles Moss have recently written a polemic critiquing the creative commons (see the extended entry for the full article). They argue that the Creative Commons project — because it relies on an “ideology and worldview that agrees too readily with that of the global ‘creative’ and media industries,” and is “quick to accept the specious claims of neo-classical economics, with its myopic ‘incentive’ models of creativity and an instrumental view of culture as a resource” — has failed to expand the space available for the political. They argue that Lessig’s view of the commons is not “Res Communes” which lies outside of the property system (like air, and water), but instead is within the “realm of private ownership (Res Privatae)” thus cramping the view of culture and the commons as largely a capitalist construct.
In response, Berry and Moss have created the Libre Society and launched the Libre Commons project, “a set of licenses which reject the legalistic and ‘culture as resource’ position of the Creative Commons and instead hope to develop a concept of the creative multitude through political action and ethical practices.
Read their Libre Manisfesto (PDF) and their article in last month’s “Free Software Magazine” below.
Read the rest of this entry »
South African lessons: Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC)
Lawrence Lessig notes on his blog the experience
of the HSRC changing their publishing model. They started “to give away all their research books for free online, and offer a high quality print-on-demand service for anyone who wants the paper version. The result: ‘the sales turnover of the publishing department has risen by 300%.’”
Way to go! Copyright must be changed one writer/creator at a time. And adding Lessig’s voice (not to mention stature) to this cause will shake the copyright tower to the core. Don’t forget to read the comments. Quite a good conversation going on there.
Never again. It has taken me too long to resolve myself about this, and it was too late in the process of this article to insist on something different. But from this moment on, I am committed to the Open Access pledge:
I will not agree to publish in any academic journal that does not permit me the freedoms of at least a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.
This is, of course, much less than RMS insists upon. My views are more confused than his. I am not yet convinced of this point w/r/t books. I am not yet convinced w/r/t eliminating the non-commercial restriction. But, still, there is no academic or scholarship related reason why the publishing of academic works today should require more of me than this. And to the extent academic publishing demands more of me than this, I will not support it.
Righting Copyright: Fair Use and “Digital
Environmentalism” by Robert S. Boynton, Bookforum (February/March 2005)
Boynton is director of New York University’s magazine journalism program.
Recent stirrings in legal theory may give some comfort to the activist wing of digital environmentalism. Taking for granted the fact that the problem is less the letter of intellectual property law than the spirit in which it is interpreted, Richard Posner, a federal appeals judge and prolific legal theorist, and others have suggested some ways to remedy this problem.
Foremost among them is the doctrine of “copyright misuse.” In his California Law Review article “Fair Use and Statutory Reform in the Wake of Eldred,” [92 CALIF. L. REV. --- (2004)] Posner argues that it is more valuable, and feasible, to strengthen fair-use practices than to lobby for new copyright laws.
The problem with the current system, according to Posner, is that copyright owners systematically make improperly broad claims to their rights.
…Posner argues that when a copyright holder affixes a warning on copies of his work that “grossly and intentionally exaggerates the copyright holder’s substantive or remedial rights, to the prejudice of publishers of public-domain works, the case for invoking the doctrine of copyright misuse” has been made.
Are libraries willing to challenge copyright misuse in order to protect fair use? Or are we only willing to avoid risk and be the enforcers for the “intellectual property” industries? Boynton notes that the logic of the Constitution’s granting copyright as an incentive “has been overshadowed by the logic of reward, the thinking being that if my work continues to have value, why shouldn’t I profit from it for as long as I want?”
Will libraries defend that logic or the logic of the Constitution?
Library-Related Principles for the International Development Agenda of the World Intellectual Property Organization.
Association of Research Libraries. January 26, 2005.
An electronic form link on this page invites you to endorse these principles, which
“…were prepared for use in discussions at the World Intellectual Property Organization concerning the impact of intellectual property protection on economic development and the significance of copyright exceptions for libraries, educational institutions, and the disabled.” Four Goals:
DANGLING CONVERSATION
Rock & Rap Confidential. No. 209, January 2005.
This is a very nice short item in a great little newsletter. The article is about the
Pew Internet & American Life Project
study, Artists, Musicians, and the Internet, of 2,755 artists.
The study shows that musicians are embracing the Internet and do not share the music industry’s antipathy to file sharing. The
story shows what the music industry thinks of musicians when it quotes Jay Rosenthal, a music industry lawyer, as saying that interviewing musicians was “like going to Fallujah and asking how they feel about Americans.”
It also quotes Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy:
“What if there was a movement to shut down libraries because book publishers and authors were up in arms over the idea that people are reading books for free? It would send a message that books are only for the elite who can afford them.
India struggles to document its biodiversity.
by CHANDRIKA MAGO.
The Times of India.
THURSDAY, JANUARY 27, 2005.
In the United States, it is the entertainment industries (RIAA, MPAA, etc.) that have latched on to the term “piracy” for what they describe as “theft” of their “intellectual property.” But in third world countries, piracy is a much more serious problem than teenagers copying pop-songs. In the 1990s, the U.S. granted a patent on
turmeric’s use in healing wounds, something
which India had taken for granted. Since then India has been leading the way in trying to identify and protect its tradtional knowledge through programs such as the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL).
This article describes efforts to document India’s biodiversity by panchayats (institutions of local self-government).
In certain states, panchayats are now preparing bioresource registers. Activist Ashish Kothari says there are two broad models. One, where scientists, NGOs and others facilitate a community register in a uniformly applicable format that is also “computerisable”. This would enable larger databases to be constructed, village up. The second is where the community itself prepares the register, in its own language and format, primarily for inter-community exchange.
See also: Biopiracy
The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge by Vandana Shiva. South End Press, 1997. Available at the library.