Copyright

The Growing Movement for Copyright Reform

by on December 4, 2008 · 14 comments

Mike Masnick notes that a grassroots coalition seems to have killed Canada’s version of the DMCA. Of course, legislation backed by powerful interest groups is never dead for good, but for now, it looks like Canada will be DMCA-free for the foreseeable future.

It’s worth remembering that when the actual DMCA was passed here in the US 10 years ago, it faced very little serious opposition. Part of that is probably because Slashdot and the rest of the tech blogosphere was still in its infancy. But I think it’s also a sign of how much progress has been made in spreading awareness about copyright issues and getting non-geeks interested and engaged. I remember organizing an anti-DMCA organization at the University of Minnesota in the wake of the 2001 Sklyarov arrest and struggling to explain to non-techies what the DMCA was and why they should care about it.

The DMCA still isn’t a household concept yet, but knowledge and understanding of the DMCA and other copyright issues is a lot more widespread than it was a decade ago. And at least up North they’ve figured out how to translate that broader public interest into effective political advocacy. If the copyright reform movement continues growing over the next decade the way it has over the last decade, I think there’s a real chance that we’ll be able to stop the otherwise-inevitable Copyright Term Extension Act of 2018. I had sort of resigned myself to perpetual copyright extension, but ideas have consequences, and the debate may become so lopsided by 2018 that even the copyright industry’s millions may not be enough to buy them another 20 years of monopoly rents.

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What Will It Take to Stop File Sharing?

by on December 4, 2008 · 33 comments

It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that vigorous prosecution of the war on file sharing will lead to some deeply illiberal results. And our good friends at the Progress and Freedom Foundation’s Center for Digital Property periodically write things that confirm the point. Former PFFer Patrick Ross, for example, has compared the war on file sharing to America’s “lax” approach to drug law enforcement. And last year Jim DeLong made the argument that stopping file sharing will require copyright laws so draconian that they will make today’s laws, including the DMCA and lawsuits against 12-year-olds, look “ridiculously permissive.”

PFF’s new copyright guru, Tom Sydnor, seems to be equally enthusiastic about using ever-more-draconian legal penalties and restrictions on civil liberties in order to back up his vision of copyright. His latest target is online anonymity, as he argues that Boston University is guilty of “incompetence” for allowing anonymous communications on its network:

For those seeking to enforce federal laws or rights other than copyrights, this order is all bad news. London-Sire suggests that BU has made its campus network into a de-facto safe harbor for anyone using the Internet to commit any crime. It would seem that terrorists, pedophiles, phishing-scheme operators, hackers, identity thieves, and copyright pirates who can access the Internet through BU’s network now have a get-out-of-jail-free card–a judicial decision holding that any identifying data provided by BU is too hopelessly unreliable to support so much as the filing of a civil lawsuit.

What’s amazing about this argument is that it proves way, way too much: it applies to any network provider that allows customers to communicate without identifying themselves first. So, for example, the Panera down the street from me offers anonymous, free WiFi access. Terrorists, pedophiles, phishing-scheme operators, hackers, identity thieves, and copyright pirates can walk into Panera, commit a variety of crimes, and walk out, and in all likelihood Panera won’t be able to provide the police with any useful information about the culprit. (Panera might have logs showing the user’s MAC address, but these are not easy to match to an individual, and they can be spoofed anyway)
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Hello, Jonah

by on December 3, 2008 · 9 comments

Like it or not, we live in the belly of Leviathan. Friends of liberty tend not to like it. Rather than giving in to death-by-digestion, or the dreaded Lower Intestines of Statism, they struggle to escape. Hello, Jonah, describes that plight, prescribes a cure, and wryly notes the outcome:

As with Nice to Be Wanted, Sensible Khakis and Take Up the Flame, a Creative Commons license allows pretty free non-commercial use of Hello, Jonah. You can find the words and chords here.

As for (admittedly unlikely) commercial licensees, Hello, Jonah asks that they tithe 10% of revenues to the Cato Institute. I worked at Cato some years ago, and continue to support its good works. Like Jonah, Geppetto, and Pinnochio, Cato works from within the belly of the Beast, helping us all of us who “struggle to get out.”

[Crossposted at Agoraphilia and Technology Liberation Front.]

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Lessig’s call for a “simple blanket license” in Remix

by on December 1, 2008 · 36 comments

Lessig Remix coverI’m finishing up Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig’s latest book, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy and wanted to make a brief comment about his call for a “simple blanket license” to solve online music piracy.

Overall, I thought Prof. Lessig made a good case regarding the benefits of “remix culture” and why copyright law should leave breathing room for the various derivative works of amateur creators. On the other hand, Lessig still too often blurs remix culture with “ripoff culture” (i.e., those who aren’t out to create anything new but instead just take something without paying a penny for it).

To solve that latter problem, Lessig again endorses a proposal that William Fisher, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and others have made for collective licensing of all online music, but he fails to drill down into the devilish details. He says, for example, that “by authorizing a simple blanket licensing procedure, whereby users could, for a low fee, buy the right to freely file-share” we could “decriminalize file sharing.” (p. 271)

I respect the fact that Lessig is at least acknowledging a problem exists and proposing a solution to it, but the collective licensing approach will be anything but “simple” in practice. As I have pointed out here before, collective licensing proposals and efforts almost always become compulsory in practice.  They inevitably involve government mandates to determine (1) who pays in, (2) how much they pay in, as well as (3) how much gets paid out and, (4) who gets the money.

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Collective Ownership vs. Non-ownership: A Primer

by on November 28, 2008 · 15 comments

It’s sad that it even needs to be said, but Mike Masnick reminds us that if you’re writing about “Digital Socialism and the Tyranny of the Consumer” then you’re deeply, deeply confused. The “tyranny of the consumer” is the distinctive feature of free-market economies. And if we were going to label someone in the copyright debate “socialist,” it would be those who advocate government-granted monopolies in the reproduction of creative works, not those who want to repeal them. The author of this piece seems not to grasp the distinction between collectively-owned resources and unowned resources. Here’s a handy cheat sheet:

Collectively Owned Unowned
The US Post Office
The British National Health Service
American public schools
AIG
Amtrak
The Cuban economy

Air
Sunlight
The Bible
Tom Sawyer
War and Peace
The TCP/IP protocols

If you’re a supporter of the kinds of institutions we find in the first column, it might be reasonable to call you a “socialist.” If you support those in the second column, not so much.

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Collective Licensing Debate Creates Some Seriously Strange Bedfellows

by on November 20, 2008 · 0 comments

Is there any other issue under the tech policy sun today that creates stranger intellectual bedfellows than collective licensing of online music? After all, as I noted here before, on the pro-collective licensing side we find mortal enemies EFF and RIAA (at least Warner) in league. And on the anti-collective licensing side, we have Mike Masnick and Andrew Orlowski. If you locked those two guys in a room and tossed out any other copyright topic, they’d probably end up killing each other with their bare hands. But somehow they agree on this one (albeit for somewhat different reasons).

Anyway, I continue to have mixed, but generally skeptical, feelings about online collective licensing. There are countless thorny fairness issues on both the artist and consumer side of things. What’s the pay-in rate? How is it set? Who all pays in? Who gets paid out, how much, and by what formula? And God only knows how you deal with those parties (whether they be ISPs, consumers, or even artists) who don’t want to be a part of the scheme.

For these reasons, I’ve always felt a voluntary collective licensing scheme for the Internet is challenging, if not impossible. It would have to be compulsory to be a truly blanket license that covered all music, all users, and all platforms. I’m not too fond of that approach, but I think that’s where we are likely heading in the copyright wars. After all, that’s how it has been resolved in many other contexts historically. But that doesn’t give me any comfort since those other systems have been a mess in practice. This 2004 Cato study by Robert Merges provides some details and makes the case against apply the compulsory licensing approach to the online music marketplace.

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Book Review: Blown to Bits by Abelson, Ledeen, & Lewis

by on November 18, 2008 · 20 comments

Blown to Bits coverI’ve just finished reading Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion, by Hal Abelson, Ken Ledeen, and Harry Lewis, and it’s another title worth adding to your tech policy reading list. The authors survey a broad swath of tech policy territory — privacy, search, encryption, free speech, copyright, spectrum policy — and provide the reader with a wonderful history and technology primer on each topic.

I like the approach and tone they use throughout the book. It is certainly something more than “Internet Policy for Dummies.” It’s more like “Internet Policy for the Educated Layman”: a nice mix of background, policy, and advice. I think Ray Lodato’s Slashdot review gets it generally right in noting that, “Each chapter will alternatively interest you and leave you appalled (and perhaps a little frightened). You will be given the insight to protect yourself a little better, and it provides background for intelligent discussions about the legalities that impact our use of technology.”

Abelson, Ledeen, and Lewis aren’t really seeking to be polemical in this book by advancing a single thesis or worldview. To the extent the book’s chapters are guided by any central theme, it comes in the form of the “two basic morals about technology” they outline in Chapter 1:

The first is that information technology is inherently neither good nor bad — it can be used for good or ill, to free us or to shackle us. Second, new technology brings social change, and change comes with both risks and opportunities. All of us, and all of our public agencies and private institutions, have a say in whether technology will be used for good or ill and whether we will fall prey to its risks or prosper from the opportunities it creates. (p. 14)

Mostly, what they aim to show is that digital technology is reshaping society and, whether we like or it not, we better get used to it — and quick!  “The digital explosion is changing the world as much as printing once did — and some of the changes are catching us unaware, blowing to bits our assumptions about the way the world works… The explosion, and the social disruption that it will create, have barely begun.” (p 3)

In that sense, most chapters discuss how technology and technological change can be both a blessing and a curse, but the authors are generally more optimistic than pessimistic about the impact of the Net and digital technology on our society. What follows is a quick summary of some of the major issues covered in Blown to Bits.

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Sensible Khakis: An Entrepreneurial Anthem

by on November 15, 2008 · 6 comments

Entrepreneurs rock! You wouldn’t guess it, though, to listen to rock music. (Marc Knopfler’s, Boom, Like That, says something about the founding and rise of McDonald’s, granted, but it hardly casts the enterprise in a very flattering light.) So in honor of entrepreneurs everywhere—but especially those in the board sports industries, whom I thank for making some very fun toys—I offer Sensible Khakis:

Like Take Up the Flame, which I coughed up on YouTube last week, Sensible Khakis’ license leaves you free to play it just for fun. You can find the chords and lyrics—including the law-geek verse, not included in the video above, about the choices entrepreneurs face between sole proprietorships, corporations, LLPs, and LLCs—here. Like the terms attached to Take Up the Flame, any commercial licensees of Sensible Khakis will have to pay a tithe to one of my favorite causes—this time, Surfrider Foundation. That is not a likely scenario, admittedly, but I figure that the thought counts for something.

[Crossposted at Agoraphilia and Technology Liberation Front.]

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“Take Up the Flame”

by on November 8, 2008 · 8 comments

The fight for freedom has seen brighter days, I grant. I think it will see still brighter days yet, though, if we can encourage another generation to join the cause. Towards that end, I wrote a song, “Take Up the Flame.”

As the song’s credits indicate, I’ve dedicated the song to my old friend and mentor, Walter E. Grinder—one of the many people who inspired me to take up “the flame.” I originally planned to debut the song at a conference planned by the West Coast chapter of the Students for Liberty, to be held at Stanford University in mid-November. I figured that Walter, who lives nearby, could hear the tune in person. That meeting got cancelled, alas. Not to be deterred, though, I’m now distributing the song virtually.

The song’s credits also indicate that I’ve released it under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License, and made the lyrics and chords freely available for downloading. It would delight me if somewhere, someday, “Take Up the Flame” helped to raise the spirits of young folks rallying for the Good Fight. (Although I don’t imagine anyone will find much reason to license the song commercially, I’ve also stipulated that any such licensee must agree to tithe a portion of the proceeds—10% of income, traditionally—to the Institute for Humane Studies, an organization that has long taught students about liberty.) Sing it loudly and proudly, friends of freedom!

[Crossposted at Agoraphilia and Technology Liberation Front.]

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FTC to Examine Intellectual Property Dec. 5 – Cato to Examine Intellectual Property Monday

by on November 7, 2008 · 7 comments

The Federal Trade Commission has announced that it will hold “a series of public hearings beginning on December 5, 2008, in Washington, D.C., to explore the evolving market for intellectual property (IP).”

It’s timely, then, that we will be having a forum Monday on a provocative book whose thesis is the title: Against Intellectual Monopoly. Co-author Michele Boldrin will present the book, and Rob Atkinson of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation will critique it.

Highlighting one of the issues at Monday’s forum, the Arts+Labs blog points to Atkinson’s testimony about the value of American intellectual property on the export market. Over 50 percent of U.S. exports depend on some form of IP protection, according to Rob Atkinson.

It’ll be a good, interesting discussion. Register here now.

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