Glen Whitman wonders why karaoke manufacturers record their own versions of hit songs rather than taking the originals and stripping out the vocals. The result is a nice summary of the law of copyright as it applies to covers and compulsory licensing. Glen’s conclusion:
Here’s your choice as a karaoke producer: You can use your own musicians and sound technicians to recreate the work, and then pay a few cents per song (multiplied by the number of copies made). Or you can use the original track and strip out the vocals; but in order to do so, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, with all the transaction costs and probably higher price that would entail.
Is this system efficient? On the one hand, it’s clearly a waste of resources to hire musicians and sound technicians to reproduce works that already exist. In addition, the perceived quality will generally be lower than the original, since karaoke singers generally want something as close to the original as possible. On the other hand, extending the property rule to cover indirect duplication would create a hold-out problem: copyright owners could demand high prices for the right to create karaoke tracks. Real resources would be wasted on the negotiation process; worse, if negotiations ever broke down, some great songs might never get converted to karaoke form.
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A Wikipedia critic claims that plagiarism is rampant on the site:
Daniel Brandt found the examples of suspected plagiarism at Wikipedia using a program he created to run a few sentences from about 12,000 articles against Google Inc.’s search engine. He removed matches in which another site appeared to be copying from Wikipedia, rather than the other way around, and examples in which material is in the public domain and was properly attributed. Brandt ended with a list of 142 articles, which he brought to Wikipedia’s attention. The site’s founder, Jimmy Wales, acknowledged that plagiarized passages do occasionally slip in but he dismissed Brandt’s findings as exaggerated.
It seems to me that there’s some ambiguity here between plagiarism and copyright infringement. Some of the articles were determined to be “OK because copied passages came from the public domain.” That’s a defense against copyright infringement, but not against plagiarism. This confusion is intensified by the final paragraph of the article:
Editors found extensive problems in several cases, with many still not yet fully checked. Articles with offending passages have been stripped of most text. An entire paragraph in Alonzo Clark’s entry, for instance, was deleted, leaving the article with the bare-bones: “Alonzo M. Clark (August 13, 1868-October 12, 1952) was an American politician who was Governor of Wyoming from 1931 to 1933.” The original article, Brandt said, was copied from a biography on the Wyoming state government site.
Aren’t government documents automatically placed in the public domain? If so, isn’t the remedy simply to include an attribution that the material came from the state of Wyoming’s website?
Here’s what I’ve been waiting for since the day I bought my Microsoft XBOX 360. If these rumors are true, Microsoft could soon be making downloadable high-definition movies available via its XBOX Live / XBOX Marketplace service. You’ll need a pretty fast Internet connection, of course, but luckily I do via Verizon’s outstanding FIOS (fiber) service. I currently download all sorts of HD movie trailers and game demos via the XBOX Marketplace and they look great and work perfectly. I can just leave my XBOX running overnight and order up a bunch of content and it’s all sitting there when I wake up in the morning. Or I can just download that content while I’m playing games and the system notifies me once the clips and demos have finished downloading.
So, it’s only natural that Microsoft would want to take the next step and allow users to download entire movies at some point. This would be a welcome alternative to the somewhat cumbersome MovieLink and CinemaNow systems that I’ve looked into. They don’t have much HD material on their services.
Microsoft will also be willing to work with the studios to ensure secure delivery and proper compensation, so I don’t see any copyright concerns here. Importantly, however, the XBOX 360 does not have HDMI or DVI digital outputs, only analog component video connections. Consequently, some users are still concerned that studios might down-res HD video content in the future via the “image contraint token” copy protection scheme. So far the studios have not felt the need to do that, however. But they might in the future if illegal redistribution of copyrighted content becomes a bigger concern. Right now, it’s just too hard to pirates to move big high-def files around on current generation networks, so it’s not a big deal yet. Read this IGN.com story for more details.
Regardless, I hope Microsoft makes this happen, and soon. I have already pre-ordered Microsoft’s upcoming HD-DVD sidecar ($199) from Amazon and it is due to be delivered in a few weeks. It will play next-generation movies of the HD-DVD format, but that still doesn’t give me a Blu-Ray solution. So, I’m hoping that I’ll be able to download all my HD movies via my XBOX Live connection in the future instead of having to purchase a Blu-Ray player.
Now it looks like I’ll next need to go buy that rumored 100GB hard drive for the XBOX if MS makes it! That 20-gig drive I’ve got now won’t be able to hold too many HD movie downloads.
Ars has an in-depth write-up of the Broadcast Treaty now wending its way through WIPO. Their conclusion:
The most consistent criticism of the treaty is much broader than any of these specific worries. It’s a simple question: “why do we need this treaty at all?”
As the CDT puts it, “proponents of the treaty have largely failed to articulate why such a treaty is necessary.” Most broadcasters make the case that they need protection from signal theft, but the rights found in the treaty often go far beyond preventing pirates from ripping off a signal. Intel argued back in April that “the treaty should be abandoned,” and many nongovernmental organizations feel the same way.
On September 5, 2006, a group of technology and civil liberties groups (that included Verizon, Intel, and HP) banded together to sign an open letter on the treaty. “We remain unconvinced that a treaty is necessary at all.,” they said. “We note with concern that treaty proponents have not clearly identified the particular problems that the treaty would ostensibly solve, and we question whether there are in fact significant problems that are not addressed adequately under existing law.”
iCraveTV was mentioned earlier as an example of the problems that broadcasters wanted to address, but it’s noteworthy that the case was resolved without any of these new rights, and that such cases are infrequent in developed countries, where existing law is generally sufficient to address them.
Sounds about right to me. And as the article explains, this is a rare battle where the good guys seem to be winning.
Many months ago, Derek Slater pointed me to the paper he did while he was at the Berkman Center late last year. It’s been on my to-read list ever since, and I’ve finally gotten a chance to check it out.
The paper reports on the increasing popularity of what they call “taste-sharing” tools on the Internet. That would include peer-to-peer file-sharing sites, but it also includes collaborative filtering tools like Amazon’s “People who bought this book also bought…” feature, and Apple’s iTunes playlist sharing tools.
Clearly, the trends Derek identified in this paper have continued into 2006, as evidenced by Microsoft choosing to make music sharing one of the central selling points of its Zune media devices. I’ve also read that the community features of YouTube were an important factor in that sites meteoric rise. Consumers clearly love being able to share their cultural tastes with others, and so smart media companies will find ways to make it easier for their customers to recommend their products to others.
Mike Masnick points out that the British are now considering extending copyright to 95 years, as the United States did in 1998. I’ll heartily concur with Mike’s analysis:
On archiving, he brushes off the concern of the library by suggesting that the copyright owners can do a fine job archiving everything on their own, and that there’s really no need for librarians to worry about such petty little things. “The British Library isn’t the only archivist in town. The idea that if it weren’t for the British Library no archiving would be going on is false.” However, if it’s a really big concern, he might, possibly be willing to carve out an exception. Of course, he’s missing the fact that these firms are archiving content only based on commercial viability, leaving plenty of other works out in the cold. A large part of the debate is over how to archive “orphan works” that have no direct commercial value, but cannot be copied due to copyright restrictions. Because commercial entities are only interested in content that has commercial value, they’re not archiving the rest of it. This is just one of the reasons why orphan works laws make sense.
The bigger issue, though, is copyright extension, and again, the guy from BPI is really far off-base. The purpose of copyright is to put in place the incentives for people to create creative works that they might not have done otherwise. Once that work is created, it’s hard to see any reason to increase the incentive. After all, the work has already been created. However, here, the BPI representative totally twists the purpose of copyrights around: “Copyrights are the asset bases of British record companies. If we enhance the asset base, we can go on to make other, more exciting entrepreneurial investment decisions. If we increase the length of the term, we increase the value of these assets.” …That’s not the purpose of copyright at all.
Indeed it’s not. This is a good example of Ed Felten’s Pizzaright Principle. More fundamentally, it’s an example of Frederic Bastiat’s broken window fallacy in action. Obviously, if you change the law to enhance the profitability of a particular industry, that industry may invest the increased profits in beneficial ways. But that money isn’t created by the government–it’s taken out of the pockets of consumers who would otherwise have spent the money on other products like iPods or tennis shoes. Apple or Nike are just as likely to invest their increased profits in beneficial ways.
Jim DeLong analyzes Universal’s lawsuits against YouTube competitors Grouper and Bolt:
I bet that if one looked at the contracts between Google and Universal, one would find clauses binding the signatory states to undertake such copyright wars. Now that YouTube has built up its viewership, perhaps largely on the basis of a casual attitude toward copyright, it makes sense for it to pull up the ladder. No one is more vehement in support of property rights than a buccaneer who has gotten rich. Besides, as a simple matter of competitive balance against other deep pockets, such as Sony, if YouTube must incur the ongoing costs of carefully tiptoeing down the path of righteousness, then it has a strong interest in being sure that others must incur similar costs.
These developments will not prevent new sites from arising, but it means that such sites must start with pockets deep enough to engage in the monitoring necessary for compliance. They will also probably be forced to get licensed from the get-go for the inevitable violations
Legal compliance as a barrier to entry! Personally, I love it, because it is so wonderfully entrepreneurial.
I can think of a number of words to describe this strategy, but “entrepreneurial” isn’t one of them.
As argued by Tim and Jim in their recent posts, the decision by the Norwegian broadband carrier NextGenTel to limit the bandwidth available to NRK (Norway’s broadcaster) for its IPTV service–unless it paid for more, and the subsequent withdrawal of that policy, shows a functioning market, rather than a market failure.
Tim and Jim stress that consumer reaction forced NextGenTel to reverse its policy. They are correct, although that still leaves the impression that this was a case of a network giant trying (unsuccessfully) to use its muscle to impose unreasonable conditions. But there’s more to it than that. First, NextGenTel doesn’t seem like much of a giant. It’s no monopolist, or even a former monopolist. Instead, its a relatively small start-up, launched only six years ago. Purchased earlier this year by a firm called TeliaSonera, NextGenTel itself only has some 150 employees. It’s not clear to me whether they even own their own infrastructure. Their website mentions only that its network “consists of approximately 850 DSLAMs,” implying the rest is leased. If bottleneck control of infrastructure is a necessary condition for neutrality regulation–as most regulation agree it is–then NextGenTel’s actions should not be of concern.
In any case, NextGenTel’s policy was hardly unreasonable. The “victim” in this case was NRK, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. The IPTV service at issue here was apparently launched by NRK earlier this year. In a press release issued in May, NRK boasted that its service would be provided “with minimal capital investment and very low cost of ownership.” Part of that capital investment needed for the high-bandwidth demands of NRK’s new service no doubt would be made instead by NextGenTel and other broadband networks. It seems entirely understandable that NextGenTel didn’t want to play this role in NRK’s business plans.
Rather than a dominant firm using its power to impose unreasonable restrictions, this seems to be a case of a competitive firm asking for reasonable compensation. It also seems that if supporters of neutrality regulation want a smoking gun of market failure, they will have to keep looking.
Derek Slater notes an important wrinkle in the recent YouTube news:
Lost in the GooTube shuffle last week was some even bigger news for the scores of YouTube users who already enjoyed lip syncing (and hip shaking) to their favorite songs and posting home videos to the site. Deals worked out with Sony BMG, Universal, and Warner Music suggest that fans will be able to freely remix and share popular sound recordings from those major record labels’ catalogs. When a remix video gets viewed, YouTube will share a cut of the advertising revenue with the rights holder.
It’s a simple concept with potentially profound implications. Artists get paid, while fans can keep on sharing remixed tunes on the site and push the boundaries of user generated media even further. No fans or innovators get sued in the process.
That raises an important question: why can’t P2P users get a similar deal? EFF has long advocated that the music industry blanket license P2P users to let them keep sharing in a way that gets artists paid. The labels could help Internet users get legal by cutting a deal with an intermediary, whether a P2P company, an ISP, or a collective licensing society like ASCAP.
It’s worth noting that Prof. Picker called this development back in June. The deals announced last week appear to use exactly the model professor Picker predicted:
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Our spam filter caught a comment from my post earlier this week about fashion copyrights. I think it’s worth reproducing verbatim:
There’s an interesting discussion of the issue over at AntitrustProf Blog.
If you buy the notion that it’s a good idea to protect boat hull designs, then why not extend protection to fashion? On the other hand, if we protect boat hull designs and dresses, why not patent storylines and plots, or extend copyright to protect a hairdo. Maybe Tyra Banks can gain IP protection for her figure (not just her persona, but her figure). In order to protect himself against infringement, Walter Payton should be able to secure the rights on his running moves, so no NFL rookies will be able to steal from him.
Getting back to reality, protection of industrial designs is not new. The Copyright Office prepared an interesting report about proposed protections for fashion design. They conclude with this:
As stated above, the Office does not yet have sufficient information to make any judgment whether fashion design legislation is desirable. Proponents of legislation have come forward with some anecdotal evidence of harm that fashion designers have suffered as a result of copying of their designs, but we have not yet seen sufficient evidence to be persuaded that there is a need for legislation. We look forward to the Subcommittee’s hearing, at which proponents of the legislation will have an opportunity to make their case and at which the voices of other affected parties can be heard.
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