Posts Tagged ‘copyright’

From 1987, via @torproject, comes this emotional appeal for anonymity (and reuse):

The contemporary ego is enormous, and suits for plagiarism are not uncommon. “I wrote this,” is the accusation. “You copied it.” How times have changed! Up through Shakespeare’s day, writers were more interested in basing their thoughts on older works than in writing something totally original. School children would compress the works of the classics or elaborate on them. They learned through imitation. Instead of having to guarantee to their professors that every word they uttered and every thought they conceived was theirs alone, they were expected to show that everything they said had been said before. Even Shakespeare’s plays were developed from histories and older plays and romances and stories, the authors of which are unknown in many cases.

Read on.

Mike had a story yesterday about how the University of Tampa told students that they could have no more than 3.4 people in their dorm rooms watching the Superbowl, lest they violate the public performance provision of copyright. Unique case of confusion, right?

Actually, I had a similar moment while watching the game with (more than 3.4) friends. During the commercial for Hulu, a friend quizzically asked, “How can they advertise if they are illegal?” A couple of my friends murmured agreement before I informed them that Hulu was started by Fox and NBC and pays for the shows the content they have.

It really struck a chord with me.

The big content companies have so perverted public perception of intellectual property and the Internet that people presume that any good service online is illegal. Think about that! Even people whose friend is a (self-admitted) IP geek assume that perfectly normal behavior (time shifting content) is only the domain of “pirates.” Not only does it speak to the lack of innovation from big content, it represents a huge hurdle for the future of media (although my generation is willing to use Hulu, even if it were illegal).

Mike rightly chastised IP lawyers for mocking the confusion instead of working to improve the confusing state of copyright law. I would chastise myself and the rest of the free culture movement for not providing enough education as to the realities of intellectual property and innovation.

Since coming to college, I’ve taken a keen interest in how intellectual property effects higher education. One of the best bloggers in that arena is Duke’s Kevin Smith on their Scholarly Communications blog. His recent post about copyright brings up a great point:

“The second point that seems significant to me is the complaint sometimes heard about the DMCA and the ruling in the dancing baby case that it has created too great a burden on the content companies for them to have to evaluate the possibility of fair use before they send a takedown notice.  Although I understand the argument that a business needs to streamline those processes that merely protect profits and do not generate them, it is hard to be too sympathetic when, in the higher education environment, we are called on to make many decisions about fair use every day, usually without recourse to a stable of lawyers.  The law of fair use is intentionally, and I think correctly, open-ended and flexible; it does not lend itself to streamlined or automated processes precisely so that it can remain useful as new innovations and technologies come along.  The burden of having to make individual fair use decisions is shared by users and content creators alike; it may not be efficient, but in the end the social benefit of doing things this way clearly outweigh the costs.”

It is the conceit of the large content industries to think they are entitled to certain profits, especially when more laudable professions, like higher education, do not receive the same benefits that the content industries believe they deserve.

As some of you may know, I founded the Georgetown University chapter of Students for Free Culture. One of the main tasks has been to raise awareness about free culture on a campus where it is little considered. This blog post, via Fred Benenson, eloquently explains why that task matters:

“There is a common assumption that light pollution affects only astronomers, and a similar assumption that copyright affects only content owners and pirates. This is obviously not the case. And while these issues are not directly observed on a day-to-day basis, they are degrading our shared commons at a rapid pace. Environmentalists, for their part, have done an exemplary job over the past two decades at making the ecological problems we face palpable, a task helped ironically by the mercurial temperament and apocalyptic manifestations of nature at large. Those in the free culture movement could work towards the same – articulating to a mainstream the need for as rich a cultural commons as we desire a natural commons. Until this is fully achieved the public domain, like darkness, will become increasingly a memory, a fabled past still in our collective conscious but no longer a true reality.”

Last week, over at Techdirt I wrote a post that proved to be quite controversial. “Do We Really Want an Internet Run By Lynch Mobs?” pointed to some recent activities by cybercrime experts and ISPs to disconnect the companies (like McColo) hosting botnets, spammers and other online criminals. Although the specific examples were undertaken so as to minimize unintended consequences and spillover, I worried that they set a precedent for extralegal solutions to illegal activity. Instead of causing a hiccup in online crime and forcing the criminals to move to other jurisdictions, secruity experts should be working with law enforcement inside of existing legal institutions to punish proven criminals. Amidst the uproar in the comments about the metaphor of “lynch mobs,” I think my main point was missed: if private entities come to see themselves as enforcers of the law, then we stand the chance of eliminating important concepts like due process, judicial oversight and democratic input.

Some of the folks involved with taking McColo offline thought it was nonsense that what they did could be abused – after all, they were very conscientious of making sure that the spammers they were punsihing were indeed guilty. My argument wasn’t so much with them, but with the style of enforcement. By no means does the law always get things right, but the checks and balances within it help avoid rash decisions. Take the news out of Michigan State University where a student government leader was found guilty of spamming university faculty after emailing 391 professors about a controversial change in the academic calendar. Although the scale differs, MSU is attempting to do the same thing HostExploit.com does – use extralegal efforts to stop cybercrime. As EFF, FIRE and others point out, in doing so, they overstep constitutional boundaries.

Today’s big news about the RIAA suspending their “sue-the-fans” policy made it clear that extralegal law enforcement is about to explode in popularity. Instead of continuing to file lawsuits against people they allege were downloading or making available music on p2p systems, the RIAA has “hashed out preliminary agreements with major ISPs under which it will send an email to the provider when it finds a provider’s customers making music available online for others to take.” The ISPs will agree to cut off service for repeat offenders (2-3 times).

This has a number of problems. As Fred Benenson points out, the courts are starting to turn against the RIAA’s tactics and legal theories about “making available” but ISPs need not heed those esoteric copyright differences. Instead, they can simply amend their Terms of Service (ToS) to reflect the extralegal arrangement worked out between the RIAA and themselves. Just as the courts are beginning to realize that identifying users based on IP address is flimsy proof at best, ISPs will use this approach to kick users off from the Internet.

Reasonable people may argue that companies should be free to construct ToS to their liking and customers can either take them or leave them; through market forces ToS will become acceptable to both parties, goes the argument. In reality, though, ISPs hold a disproportionate amount of the power in the relationships. It is obvious why few people read ToS – they are infamous for their illegible legalese. They are written by corporate lawyers who have a keen interest in covering all their bases and are often written to give incredible leeway to the company enforcing them. And with the little local competition in the broadband market that most Americans have, taking your business elsewhere is difficult.

As Mike says in discussing this at Techdirt, “These days, an internet connection is a necessity — and taking it away from people because someone is sharing the gift of music with others not for any sort of commercial gain is totally unbalanced.” In promoting freedom of expression, it is critically important to err on the sie of unfettered Internet access. Internet access, per se, may not be a right, but it is crucial to a free information age: Koffi Annan once said, “And of course, the information society’s very life blood is freedom. It is freedom that enables citizens everywhere to benefit from knowledge, journalists to do their essential work, and citizens to hold their government accountable. Without openness, without the right to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers, the information revolution will stall, and the information society we hope to build will be stillborn.”

A society of rash decision-making, biased towards revoking Internet access is not one to which we should move, whether the auspices be copyright protection or spam elimination. The legal system can be frustratingly slow and wrongheaded at times, but Americans are lucky to have one of the most robust, honest systems in the world and we shouldn’t toss it away.