Under US law, pretty much anything you write down is copyrighted. Scrawl an original note on a napkin and it’s protected until 70 years after your death.
Note: None of this post should be taken as criticism of Zuckerman. I’m just using his sentence as a foil. He is a great blogger, the above is a great post of his, which furthermore talks about the great work of some of my colleagues…
In what sense is the hypothetical scrawl above “protected” by copyright? A scrawl might be protected by a glass case or digitization, or even (somewhat remotely) by secure property rights in napkins, glass cases, and computers.
No, copyright restricts the ability of others to use representations of the scrawl legally, without obtaining permission from the scrawler or a party the scrawler has transferred this right to censor to.
Which brings us to another inaccurate phrasing, which has many variations, all along the lines of “copyright is the right to … a copyrighted work” where the ellipsis are filled by words like “publish”, “distribute”, or “perform”. Not true! Copyright is not required to have the right to publish a work, or public domain works would be illegal to publish. Instead, copyright is the right to legally restrict others from publishing, distributing, performing works.
So use of the term ‘copyright protection’ (2,930,000 Google hits) instead of ‘copyright restriction’ (19,300 Google hits) is a peeve of mine and seeing copyright equated with censorship a small joy.
The ACLU has filed a brief (pdf) in the U.S. patent case called Bilski (a case I understand the End Software Patents project is watching closely) making a free speech argument against the patent in question.
I’m especially pleased that the ACLU brief makes two obvious but rarely stated points. One:
At the most basic level, it is apparent that because the First Amendment post-dates the patent clause in Article I, it modifies the patent clause.
Patents and copyright are covered in a single clause, which for reference says “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.”
Two:
Thus, the definition of “useful arts” clearly excludes music, art, and literature, all of which represent unpatentable matter clearly also protected by the First Amendment.
At today’s very well produced SanFran MusicTech Summit on a panel called “The Paradise of Infinite Storage” Mike Godwin said that the existence of a recording industry protected by copyright is a very recent phenomenon and conjectured that one could take the position that all of the music created to this point is enough. I don’t recall whether he spelled it out, but the implication being that all music should be available for free and we shouldn’t worry about the creation of more music.
This really upset someone in the audience who identified themselves as representing songwriters for decades. This person righteously stipulated that music has value, musicians must be paid, and that if recording copyright is recent, so was the abolition of slavery. It is really too bad he didn’t make reference to Nazis instead of slavery. Hmm, they did use slave labor.
Unfortunately Godwin said he did not agree with the conjecture and agreed with the vacuous statement that music has value (duh, consumers spend valuable time listening to music). But if the conjecture is not plainly correct, it is at least extremely weighty. Given that a vast amount of music exists and much more will be created regardless of protection, any harms done (e.g. to free speech and innovation) in the name of incentivizing marginal additions to this vast supply must be viewed with extreme skepticism.
There are basically two perspectives in the ‘Music and Technology‘ conversation. One’s priority is to ensure copyright holders are paid, with a strong preference for protecting existing revenue streams, and the other’s priority is to build cool stuff with new technology. Both were present in every part of this conference that I saw.
Probably the most significant example of the latter present was Lucas Gonze demoing the Yahoo! Media Player, which does a great job of playing media linked on a web page, with nice affordances for that environment.
Wikileaks, currently vapor, may be a joke. If Wikileaks is not a joke and if it successfully exposes a large number of secrets, I’d find it hilarious to see this happening on a public website and without financial incentives. P2P, digital cash, information markets, and crypto anarchy? Nope, just a wiki and a communinty.
With each new item I read about Wikileaks, usuallyviaSlashdot, my skepticism wanes and hilarity waxes. Bully for Wikileaks, the Wikileaks community, dissidents and transparency worldwide.
Of course Wikileaks is blocked in China, which gives them some cred in my opinion (but note the measurement described in that post doesn’t seem to work anymore — from within the U.S. it appears google.com and google.cn now give identical results).
I was browsing for DVDs on a cold winter afternoon in one of Beijing’s finer bootleg shops when I came upon three boxed sets of DVDs critical of communism. One of the pirated sets, produced by Turkish presenter Harun Yahya, promised to detail the horrors of communism from an Islamic perspective, another by an American producer chronicled the uncomfortably bloody rise of modern China and the third contained Tiananmen footage from BBC TV News. Presumably the DVD pirates were in it for the money, but were they also unwittingly making China a freer place?
The underground network and commercial resourcefulness of the pirates makes it technically possible for startling and truthful images to be sold more or less in the open in a less-than-open-society. In that sense, lax enforcement of intellectual copyright may inadvertently engender a kind of information freedom and even allow for the infiltration of revolutionary ideas.
If so, then the copyright zealots, mostly big US companies, with profit first and foremost on the mind, come down firmly on the side of information control and in that sense side firmly with the Beijing authorities. Subversive access of the sort I had just tapped into would dry up if US anti-piracy efforts were successful.
So an economically optimal regime would have different rules for different industries, protecting some but not others, based on their exactly supply/demand curves.
“… but don’t forget about enforcement costs.”:
But really, it doesn’t matter. There is just no fucking way that IP protection is worth the police state it would take to enforce it. And unenforced/unenforceable laws poison society by teaching people not to respect the law.
This leads more or less to my understanding of the Pirate Party sentiment, something like “There’s nothing wrong with copyright per se, but any civil liberties infringement in the name of copyright protection is totally unacceptable.”
I recommend Friedman’s essay, but of course the reason I write is to complain … about the second half of the essay’s last sentence:
Therefore I favor accepting the inevitable as soon as possible, so that we can find new ways to compensate content producers.
This closing both gives comfort to producerists (but in the beginning of the essay Friedman says that people love to create — I agree, see paying to create — and Tom W. Bell has a separate argument that should result in less concern for producers that I’ve been meaning to blog about, but should be obvious from the title — Outgrowing Copyright: The Effect of Market Size on Copyright Policy) and is a stretch — copyright might make alternatives less pressing and interesting, but it certainly does not prevent experimentation.
The dispute between the U.S. and Antigua jurisdictions over the former’s stupid campaign against online gambling is one of the most interesting happenings of the past few years. I’ve been meaning to write about it for about that long but haven’t had much more to say than what you see in the post title. Antigua correctly sees the U.S. as restraining trade and has obtained favorable rulings at the World Trade Organization.
Antigua (actually the jurisdiction of Antigua and Barbuda) is seeking the right to suspend enforcement of U.S. copyrights as an alternative remedy. Unfortunately this sounds way more interesting than it is, except possibly for its precedent. The latest ruling only allows the suspension of US$21 million worth of intellectual protectionist obligations, a trivial amount that will itself be subject to radically different interpretations considering how difficult and arbitrary the valuation of nonrival goods can be (the RIAA’s ridiculous valuation of shared audio files is exactly a case in point). Even had Antigua’s request for US$3.44 billion not been cut down by about 99.4% the result would have been largely academic.
I have sub-golf level interest in horse racing, poker, or other gaming-oriented gambling activities. So why is this case so interesting? There is The Mouse That Roared or David vs. Goliath aspect, but mostly I really want to see U.S. gambling prohibitions go down in flames, both because they are a tool for arbitrary censorship and control in much the same way copyright is and because they are a barrier to use of prediction markets.
The world will route around this U.S. stupidity, but at great loss, not least to Americans.
The major political issue of today [0] is that music distribution companies based on obsolete physical-media-distribution models (”record labels”) are trying to force owners of new distribution mechanisms, mostly built on the internet, to pay them for the privilege of competing with them; the musical group “The Grateful Dead” used to permit their fans to distribute their music by making copies of taped performances, and most of the money the Dead made came from these performances; it is traditional for performances not to send any revenue to the record label. Long compares the record labels to buggy-whip manufacturers, who are the standard historical symbol for companies who went out of business because of technological change.
This clearly relates to the passage the footnote is attached to, which is about the parallel between Adam Smith’s economic “invisible hand” and the somewhat more visible hand that wrote the king’s doom on the wall in Daniel; in this case, the invisible hand has written the doom of the record companies on the wall, and their tears will not wash out a word of it. What this has to do with Huckleberry Finn’s prohibition on seeking symbolism or morals in the book, I don’t know, although clearly Huckleberry Finn’s prohibition relates to mortals hiding messages in texts.
[0] Yes, this means I think this is more important than the struggle over energy, or the International Criminal Court, or global warming, or nuclear proliferation — the issue is whether people should be permitted to control the machines they use to communicate with one another, in short, whether private ownership of 21st-century printing presses should be permitted. (Sorry my politics intrude into this message, but I thought “the major political issue of today” required some justification, but needs to be there to explain the context to people reading this message who don’t know about it.)
That will probably seem a pretty incredible claim, but I often agree, and think Sitaker understates the case. Music distribution companies are only one of the forces for control and censorship. The long term issue is bigger than whether private ownership of 21st-century printing presses should be permitted. The issue is whether individuals of the later 21st-century will have self-ownership.
The Wikimedia Foundation board has passed a resolution that is a step toward Wikipedia migrating to the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. I have an uninteresting interest in this due to working at Creative Commons (I do not represent them on this blog), but as someone who wants to see free knowledge “win” and achieve revolutionary impact, I declare this an important step forward. The current fragmentation of the universe of free content along the lines of legally incompatible but similar in spirit copyleft licenses delays and endangers the point at which that universe reaches critical mass — when any given project decides to use a copyleft license merely because then being able to include content from the free copyleft universe makes that decision make sense. This has worked fairly well in the software world with the GPL as the copyleft license.
Copyleft was and is a great hack, and useful in many cases. But practically it is a major barrier to collaboration in some contexts and politically it is still based on censorship. So I’m always extremely pleased by any expansion of the public domain. There could hardly be a more welcome expansion than Daniel J. Bernstein’s release of his code (most notably qmail) into the public domain. Most of the practical benefit (including his code in free software distributions) could have been achieved by released under any free software license, including the GPL. But politically, check out this two minute video of Bernstein pointing out some of the problems of copyright and announcing that his code is in the public domain.
Like the acknowledgement of copyright as censorship on the Google Policy Blog a few months ago, William Patry’s Copyright is always Government Intervention is too nice to pass up, though Patry is only criticizing copyright maximalists’ selective accusation of government intervention and the Google Policy Blog said that copyright is a justifiable reason for censorship.
Some forms of censorship are entirely justifiable: the worldwide prohibitions on child pornography and copyright infringement, for example.
Yes it is called justified here, but copyright is too seldom called censorship, regardless of how obvious that is.
Others, however, are overbroad and unwarranted. When a government blocks the entire YouTube service due to a handful of user-generated videos that violate local sensibilities –- despite our willingness to IP-block illegal videos from that country –- it affects us as a non-tariff trade barrier.
I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, adding classes of trade barriers simply provides an excuse for “retaliatory” protectionism. Autonomous liberalization does the most good, and I suspect that’s as true of free speech as any other area. On the other hand, this is great to the extent free speech is actually promoted, either as intended or by crowding out pro-censorship (strong copyright) from the U.S. trade negotiation agenda.
It’s a little odd to include all those BitTorrent clients, given their very different nature. All but LimeWire, Ares, eMule, and BearShare are BT-only (their P2P download component — Opera is mainly a web browser, with built in BT support). Recent versions of LimeWire and Ares also support BT, so another provocative headline would be “LimeWire the most popular BitTorrent client?”
Most recent (for surveys publishing numbers in 2007) usage share for Firefox ranges from 11.69% to 14.32%. Of course usage share is very different from installation share (compare Opera installation share above at 2.15% and recent usage share between 0.58% and 0.77%) and P2P filesharing and download clients have different usage patterns, so any comparison is apples to oranges. However, if one could extrapolate from the Opera numbers for installation and usage, LimeWire is not more popular than Firefox.
LimeWire is still impressively popular. This probably is mostly due to open source being less susceptible to censorship than proprietary software (which has a half-life shortened by legal attack in the case of P2P). Still, I’d like to see LimeWire gain more recognition as an open source success story than it typically gets.
The really interesting speculation concerns how computing (and ok, what may or may not have been called Web 2.0) would have been different had P2P not been under legal threat for seven or so years. Subject for another post. We can’t go back, but I think it’s very much worth trying to get to a different version of there.
Yes, I know about significant digits. I’m just repeating what the surveys say.
Fortunately the article does not mention calls to suppress speech, but they will doubtless come as this form becomes more important and opportunists see polls such as the above. It may have been possible to suppress speech in the broadcast media without tremendous collateral damage. On the net, I doubt it.
Hillary 1984 works about as well as the original and captures Clinton saying nothing. But neither ad works for me — both scream “same as the old boss.” The woman with the sledgehammer needed inside help to get so close and is either part of an elite faction or the dupe of one. Apple is just another proprietary vendor and I’m sure Obama can say nothing as well as any politician.
For the record I prefer Obama over Clinton though Bill Richardson is my preferred Democrat candidate for temporary dictator of the U.S.
I hate John Edwards (the whine plus the drawl really gets at me), but in truth it’s a narrow field.
Robert Faris of the OpenNet Initiative showed a worldwide filtering map and a Venn diagram grouping jurisdictions according to whether they filter for political, security, or social content. Most that filter do so for all three. Filtering is very hard, so excepting a few jurisdictions that disallow net connectivity period, most attempt to induce a climate of self-censorship.
Ethan Zuckerman showed the Freedom Housemap of press freedom and pointed out that blogging takes off in moderately repressive jurisdictions that restrict the formal press, sending journalists to the net.
Shahed Amanullah said there are many Muslims in the US who want to debate radicals on their websites but are afraid to because merely visiting those sites will catch the eye of US security. He also said that among other things we can do is to highlight the persecution of bloggers in the Muslim world.
Jasmina Tesanovic mentioned the popularity of Blog B92, which has a very impressive Alexa rank (1,376) considering its small and relatively poor potential audience (Serbia). The site is hosted in the Netherlands.
A questioner gave examples of the importance of expatriate media about repressive jurisdictions, which Zuckerman reiterated, using the term “fourth world” to describe expatriates and the stateless.
I completely forgot to ask a question about the overlap between filtering for political and economic protectionist (i.e., copyright) purposes.
Wikileaks, currently vapor, may be a joke. If Wikileaks is not a joke and if it successfully exposes a large number of secrets, I’d find it hilarious to see this happening on a public website and without financial incentives. P2P, digital cash, information markets, and crypto anarchy? Nope, just a wiki and a communinty.
WikiLeaks will be the outlet for every government official, every bureaucrat, every corporate worker, who becomes privy to embarrassing information which the institution wants to hide but the public needs to know. What conscience cannot contain, and institutional secrecy unjustly conceals, WikiLeaks can broadcast to the world.
One of the most interesting applications is that of “information markets,” where information of various kinds is bought and sold. Anonymity offers major protections for both buyers and sellers, in terms of sales which may be illegal or regulated. Some examples: corporate secrets, military secrets, credit data, medical data, banned religious or other material, pornography, etc.
Why is more information not leaked on the net already? The technology exists to do so anonymously and has for a long time. Why is there not (or to what extent is there) a market for secrets? Again, the technology exists.
Perhaps lack of the relevant institutions in each case. One could email secrets or post to a blog anonymously, but what then? Will anyone notice? One could want to sell secrets, but how to find a buyer?
If Wikileaks succeeds it will be because it will provide, or rather its community will be, the relevant institution. Again from the Wikileaks FAQ:
WikiLeaks opens leaked documents up to a much more exacting scrutiny than any media organization or intelligence agency could provide: the scrutiny of a worldwide community of informed wiki editors.
Instead of a couple of academic specialists, WikiLeaks will provide a forum for the entire global community to examine any document relentlessly for credibility, plausibility, veracity and falsifiability. They will be able to interpret documents and explain their relevance to the public. If a document is leaked from the Chinese government, the entire Chinese dissident community can freely scrutinize and discuss it; if a document is leaked from Somalia, the entire Somali refugee community can analyze it and put it in context.
Do you eagerly await confirmation of rumors and surprises from on high, despite abuse?
You have a problem. When it comes to controlling your computing environment (i.e., much of your communication, your work, your life), you’re stupid.
Sniff the wind in Cupertino or trust those who claim to have seen top secret documents? Or read the code, developer mailing lists, wikis, planets, or trust those who have? Your choice.
When conformists’ slogan is “think different” (the white collar version of “no fear“), it’s time for revolution.
…
Each time Macworld rolls around I remember, too late, to organize a zombieflash mob for the occasion. Or rather mention the idea to cacophony people.
An observation I’ve wanted to make for awhile, given the right occasion, is that the common practice of nothing that something is not safe for work is the bottom-up, liberal, mature, and responsible analog of content rating (e.g., MPAA ratings).
NSFW is a friend telling you that viewing a link may not be appropriate in some contexts, but use your judgement. Content rating is a bureacracy telling you that viewing of some content by certain people is prohibited and perhaps enforced legally or technologically.
Of course content rating may be used to aid in making an informed choice and NSFW hints could in theory be enforced, but nevertheless I think each’s common use and source is illustrative of something.
76% say “No. Dirty election tactics will reach new depths.” in a San Francisco Chronicle online poll (no permalink, see image at right).
