A Boston Globe article on why Google makes everyone else nervous:
Research firms are only now beginning to take the measure of the company's influence. A recent study by Outsell showed that 80 percent of advertisers now use the Internet, with the adoption rate projected to hit 90 percent by 2008. While search engine advertising is expected to increase 26 percent this year, with Google raking in the largest share, spending is projected to grow 2 percent for newspaper and magazine ads and 2.4 percent for radio and television ads.
Research firms are only now beginning to take the measure of the company's influence. A recent study by Outsell showed that 80 percent of advertisers now use the Internet, with the adoption rate projected to hit 90 percent by 2008. While search engine advertising is expected to increase 26 percent this year, with Google raking in the largest share, spending is projected to grow 2 percent for newspaper and magazine ads and 2.4 percent for radio and television ads.
Similarly, the Google effect has reduced Internet service companies -- who'd once hoped to be gateways to the Internet that profited from Internet services -- to ``pipe companies" that build networks and charge businesses and consumers for access.
And, Google's e-mail, calendar, and word-processing products are pioneering an ad-supported Internet delivery model that threatens the desktop licensing model of Microsoft and other proprietary software companies, and could appeal to their ``enterprise" market of businesses and other organizations. Aiding Google's efforts to deliver robust software on the Internet, and faster search results, is a worldwide network of between 300,000 and 1 million servers, according to analysts' estimates; Google itself declines to specify its number of servers.
In addition to some of the issues mentioned in this article one of the big, big issues that companies like Google should be worried about if they seriously want these applications to take off is privacy rights and protecting individuals from unwarranted search and scanning. Trusting the company that's storing your life online is something that we all ought to take very seriously (and really it can't just be based on trust. We need an infrastructure that updates traditional protections in light of electronic storage and guarantees them as we are guaranteed protections in our homes and other properties).
Interesting opinion piece in the Christian Science Monitor (it's not new--printed in 2003--but still interesting) on the way the fashion industry treats creativity and copying and the way music and movie groups do:
The music and film industries continue to battle over the need to expand copyright protection, and to limit sharing and reuse of prior work. The fashion industry, driven by similar market interests, employs a modus operandi that accepts rather than rejects derivation and appropriation as creative tools.
The contrast is particularly fascinating, given the dependence of each of these industries on our shared cultural heritage, which we call the "commons." The music and film industries' resources are being sapped in ongoing battles about the scope of legal protection that their CDs and DVDs should enjoy and whether prior works may be freely reused. These industries are unusually possessive: Their attorneys have gone after consumers who played DVDs on non-Windows software ("piracy"), Girl Scouts who sang copyrighted songs around the campfire ("no performance license"), and kids who set up their own Harry Potter fan websites ("trademark violation").
By contrast, the fashion industry long has accepted that creativity is too large and fugitive an essence to be owned outright as property. Fashion is a massive industry that thrives in a competitive global environment despite minimal legal protections for its creative design. While many people dismiss fashion as trivial and ephemeral, its economic importance and cultural influence are enormous. US apparel sales alone were $180 billion a few years ago, supporting an estimated 80,000 garment factories, and fashion is a major force in music, entertainment, and other creative sectors.
...via Smart Mobs
So, Google Book Search wants to index the world's books and do it by scanning in as many of those books as they can and make them available for full-text searching.
One response to this is, okay, then they can just ask for permission to scan those books. Part of Google Book Search is the publishers program (now apparently called the Partners Program) which allows publishers to request that their books not be included and to request that they be included as partners, which means that they can participate in the advertising revenue. Partners can also indicate how much of a book a searcher is able to see--basic snippets, whole pages, the whole book
However, there are many many books for which the rights holder is neither obvious or easily contacted. These books are still restricted by copyright and cannot be freely copied or distributed, but the rights holders can't be located to grant permission. Basically these books are simply not available.
Google's approach is to work with libraries to scan these books and include them, contending that the process of tracking down these rights holders would be impossible and also, more radically contending that since their ultimate purpose is a search system where searchers will only see snippets of text and never the entire book (unless permission is explicitly granted through the Partners Program), that they don't need permission to scan the book. Google's argument is that the scanning is a means to an end, that they have rights to perform the end, and therefore the intermediate step is okay too (this is a bold paraphrase of the situation, of course, for more detailed analysis, you might refer to some of the articles cited later).
Google also argues, and I think this is an important argument, that a universal book search must, somehow, be universal or its value is drastically diminished.
Some questions then, about the Google Book Search project. These are questions that the lawsuits may be called upon to solve though whether they can solve them or not, remains a question.
--Is the fact that Google plans to profit from their Book Search critical in determining if this is a project that should be allowed to go forward? Some people have said it might be an acceptable project if done by a government or non-profit organization, but Google will be making money off 'our' books--is that fair?
--There seems little question (to me, at least) that Google Book Search would be a boon for people searching for information. Is the 'greater good' a good enough reason for Google Book Search to go forward?
--Shouldn't creators get paid for what they produce? If yes (and I think most people agree that the answer to this question is 'yes'), how do you balance that with the 'greater good?' Equally important, what if Google Book Search ultimately results in creators getting paid more (because people buy more books, because their publishers opt into the Partners program, etc), does that change circumstances?
--Should creators' rights trump Googles attempts to make a buck? Should creators' rights trump the greater good? Doesn't the greater good also include creators? What if Google Book Search affects their incentive to create? What if (absent Google Book Search) less access or less awareness affects readers' purchase of creators' works, which in turn affects creators' incentive to produce works? How would it be possible to determine answers to these questions?
--If we let Google do this, what's going to be the next step? How will those next steps affect publishers? Creators? Readers?
--Finally, think about this:
There are about 32 million books; 3 million in print, 3 million out of copyright, and the rest of them are still in copyright but out of print; there are very few ways to get to them. (http://paulfrankenstein.org/archives/2005/11/17_live_from_the_public_library.html).
Some of these books could profitably be forgotten forever. But what about the ones that are still valuable and useful?
Google Book Search is clearly still evolving (look at the name changes it's currently undergoing, for example). For additional details and perspectives, you may want to refer to the following articles:
Authors’ Guild v Google: Opt-out is evil, except when we do it. http://www.boingboing.net/2005/09/27/authors_guild_v_goog.html. Cory Doctorow. September 27, 2005.
Google Print, in hot water again. http://www.ibiblio.org/pomerantz/blog/?p=288. August 5, 2005.
Microsoft Research DRM Talk. http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt. Cory Doctorow. June 17, 2004.
Google Sued. http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/003140.shtml. Lawrence Lessig. September 22, 2005.
Google Responds. http://weblog.ipcentral.info/archives/2005/09/google_responds.html. IPcentral.info. James deLong. September 21, 2005
Google Print Debate on Farber's IP List. http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/10/google_print_debate_on_farbers.html. Tim O’Reilly. October 30, 2004.
On the "Google Print Book Search Publisher Partner Library Project Program": How we know Google is not like other companies. http://www.nyu.edu/classes/siva/archives/002429.html. Siva Vaidhyanathan. November 22, 2005.
Live from The Public (Library). http://paulfrankenstein.org/archives/2005/11/17_live_from_the_public_library.html. Paul Frankenstein. November 5, 2005.
...see part 1 here.
Google is being sued by the Author's Guild and the Association of American Publishers (and possibly some other people by now since it took me awhile to put this article together) over a new project called Google Print (whose name appears to have recently changed to Google Book Search). What is Google Print/Google Book Search and why are author and publisher groups suing them over it?
There seem to be as many ideas about Google Print --what it is, why it is, what it wants to be as there are opinions about whether the idea is good, wrong-headed, evil, legal, promising, or civilization-ending.
What is Google Print?
Just as Google helps you find sites you might not have found any other way by indexing the full text of web pages, Google Print, like an electronic card catalog, indexes book content to help users find, and perhaps buy, books. This ability to introduce millions of users to millions of titles can only expand the market for authors' books, which is precisely what copyright law is intended to foster.
The purpose of Google Print is to provide the means to search not just the information in web pages (which is what Google itself provides), but also the information in books. In order to make these books available for searching, Google has initiated two projects: Google Print Publisher Program (now called the Partner Program) and Google Print Library Project .
The Google Print Publisher Program (now called the Partner Program) allows publishers to supply their books to the program, to reap a percentage of ad revenue, and to set specifics about how their books can be viewed (the entire book is searchable, but users may only be able to look at a certain number of pages).
The Google Library Project works to "index the book collections of several major research libraries and make this content searchable through Google Print alongside books provided by publishers through our Publisher Program." Libraries involved include Unviersity of Michigan, Stanford, Harvard, the New York Public Library, and Oxford University.
For books obtained through the Google Library Project, which are still under copyright, searchers can see only bibliographic information and a few sentences directly related to their search criteria. For books in the public domain, searchers will be able to see as much of the book as they need.
Google also offered publishers the opportunity to opt completely out of the Google Library Project. If a publisher says, 'don't scan my books,' those books won't be scanned.
The controversy around this project generally encompasses two main arguments: that people might be able to get a complete copy of a book without paying for it and that Google has no right to scan books that are still under copyright and must obtain permission for each and every book they scan. There are additional complexities to both these issues, but, in the main, these are the objections.
Without considering copyright issues yet--or, more specifically, without considering the rights of the books' creators--could Google Print be a good thing? Absolutely. Imagine being able to search every book or some reasonable cross-section thereof. You can get bibliographic information, quotes, and pointers to books you want to buy.
Tim O'Reilly, a publisher, says:
A search engine for books will be revolutionary in its benefits. Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors than copyright infringement, or even outright piracy. While publishers invest in each of their books, they depend on bestsellers to keep afloat. They typically throw their products into the market to see what sticks and cease supporting what doesn't, so an author has had just one chance to reach readers. Until now.Google promises an alternative to the obscurity imposed on most books. It makes that great corpus of less-than-bestsellers accessible to all. By pointing to a huge body of print works online, Google will offer a way to promote books that publishers have thrown away, creating an opportunity for readers to track them down and buy them. Even online sellers like Amazon offer only a small fraction of the university libraries' titles. While there are many unanswered questions about how businesses will help consumers buy the books they've found through a search engine for printed materials that is as powerful as Google's current Web search, there's great likelihood that Google Print's Library Project will create new markets for forgotten content. In one bold stroke, Google will give new value to millions of orphaned works.
Meghan Marco, an author, who unsuccessfully tried to persuade her publisher to include her book on Google Print says:
I asked my publisher, Simon and Schuster, for my book to be included in Google Print. I was told they did not do that....
Someone asked me recently, "Meghann, how can you say you don't mind people reading parts of your book for free? What if someone xeroxed your book and was handing it out for free on street corners?"
I replied, "Well, it seems to be working for Jesus."
Regarding the copyright issue--there are two questions that come up fairly frequently. First, why does Google need to scan the whole book? Wouldn't a bibliography--all encompassing--with really, really (no, I mean really) good--like perfect--key word capability work just as well?
No. I mean, really, there's no other answer to this question. How do keywords work for web page searches? Well, pretty much not at all. Keywords never work unless you have people entering keywords for each web page who have perfect knowledge (and a very high boredom threshold), unless you know what you’re looking for, unless all the people who enter keywords for web pages and all the people who search for web pages using keywords, view the world from pretty much the same basic angle, unless you already pretty much know how to find what you want. Keywords can help you find some things that are similar in a certain way, but they rarely help you find things you didn't know you were looking for or narrow in on a topic you're not at all familiar with when you begin. In addition, keyword searches are rife with cultural and language assumptions guaranteeing that some people will never find anything they want and that you will probably never find everything you want.
...continued in Part 2.
Irving Wladawsky-Berger talks about supporting innovation in open communities. In particular, some of the issues of intellectual property:
IP management is fairly well understood if you are a business, but how do you manage IP with a dispersed community of individuals like those supporting Linux and other open source projects, which generally have no entity charged with managing IP and collecting patents? We are all learning in this area. One approach is for individual businesses to pledge patents in support of open communities. We in IBM did this with our patent pledge earlier this year, which granted access to over 500 software patents to individuals and groups working on open source software like Linux. More recently we pledged access to our patent portfolio for the development of selected open healthcare and education software standards. Other companies like Red Hat, Novell, Nokia and Sun have also made patent pledges in various forms in support of open communities.
Still another way to support these open communities is to work not just company by company, but collectively. An example of this approach is the Patent Commons Project established by OSDL to provide a central location where software patents and patent pledges from a variety of sources are housed for the benefit of open source communities.
From an article in Linux Journal by Don Marti:
In this crazy business of ours, every once in a while, companies go into a frenzy to sell technology that doesn't work to customers who don't want it. In the 1990s, did customers want overpriced UNIX from bickering vendors or stable-any-day-we-promise Windows NT? Sorry, neither one works for us. Support Linux, please. Or on-line services. AOL or Compuserve? We'll take the Internet, thanks.
...
When I talk to working IT professionals, the trend is to open up information "behind the firewall" at a company-not lock it down. People aren't worried about how to DRM-ize everything. Instead, I'm seeing enterprise Wikis. "Enterprise Wiki" still sounds funny, but companies with lots of trade secrets are rolling them out. "Edit this Page" adds value, and DRM has the opposite effect.
...via BoingBoing
Intellectual property in the face of an increasingly digital world is a hot topic--and a complex one. Intellectual property is not the same as real property, but we've often tried to treat it as if it is. This was not an issue when there were limited ways of distributing the product of intellectual property (books, recordings, etc.), which were real, physical property and were either difficult to copy or cheap enough that they weren't worth copying. Now, we're entering an age where not only is it easy to copy intellectual products, but the ease of copying and sharing is a critical part of intellectual discussion and cultural sharing (this aspect, I think, is one that corporations involved in intellectual property discussions overlook--unlike the 'piracy' rhetoric, much 'stealing' of intellectual property isn't about money).
Currently, several organizations, including but not limited to the RIAA for record producers, are attempting to maintain their current, more or less analog, business model through litigation and legislation. How's it working? Fred von Lohmann of the EFF has a very interesting article at law.com on the effect that RIAAs litigation against file downloaders has had on file sharing:
...The campaign, coordinated by the RIAA, was a last-resort maneuver by the industry to stem the tide of P2P file-sharing, which had reached mammoth proportions. In fact, some estimates put the number of American music swappers at 60 million -- that's 9 million more than voted for President Bush.
Unfortunately, the evidence thus far suggests that the RIAA litigation campaign has had little, if any, effect on P2P file-sharing. Companies like Big Champagne and BayTSP that track the online P2P population have found that the number of U.S. file-sharers continues to grow. The global file-sharing population, moreover, is skyrocketing. A survey of Internet users undertaken by the Pew Internet and American Life Project did show a marked decline in file-sharing in the months following the highly-publicized first rounds of RIAA lawsuits, but Pew's follow-up reports have documented a rebound in the months since.
....
So what about the "carrot" of authorized music services like Apple's iTunes Music Store? In the words of the RIAA, the lawsuits are also intended to "encourage music fans to turn to these legitimate services." Well, the news there is not terribly encouraging, either. While the authorized music services are attracting a modest number of customers, it is also clear that they together account for a trivial percentage of the total number of digital music files being downloaded today. In fact, it is fair to say that all of the authorized music services together do not yet amount to a drop in the digital music-downloading bucket. Apple, the most successful of all the authorized music services, sold a total of 100 million downloads in its first 15 months of operation. This sounds impressive until it is held up against the 5 billion files that move across the Kazaa network every month.
I don't want to quote the whole thing, but there's also some interesting information about alternatives to the make-them-all-criminals approach to providing fair compensation for intellectual property (and, by the way, I think this is critical--it doesn't have to be about absolute protection of intellectual property. In an ideal world ideas and discussion of ideas would be freely shared and authors and other creative artists would be fairly compensated in ways that encouraged more ideas and discussions of ideas were freely shared).
...via BoingBoing
David Weinberger posts a draft of his speech about copyright that he recently gave to the World Economic Forum
I'm a capitalist of sorts and a writer of sorts, so I am sympathetic to the idea that creators should be paid for their work. But, I'm also a citizen and a member of cultural communities. So, for one moment, I'd like you to perform an exercise in selective attention. Forget every other consideration — even though they're fair and important considerations — and see if you can acknowledge that a world in which everyone has free access to every work of creativity in the world is a better world. Imagine your children could listen to any song ever created anywhere. What a blessing that would be!
Now, I know it takes a Zen-like awareness to keep that one idea there purely, and to beat back the Buts that want to crowd in. And I by no means deny the validity of those Buts. "But if access were free, then artists couldn't support themselves. " I won't want argue with that. "But it wouldn't be fair." I won't argue that either, at least not here. All I want to do is put on the table a value that I think too often is left on the floor because, among commercial media companies, it has no champion: All things being equal, a world that shares art freely is a better world than one where access to art is stifled. And that's at least as important as Sony making its quarterly numbers.
Judge Richard Posner is guest blogging this week on Lawrence Lessig's blog. There's lots of good discussion going on, but I'd particularly point out the Judge Posner's comments on fair use, which judging by a couple of discussions I've been involved in recently, many people misunderstand (at least in part because many copyright holders overclaim copyright).
For example, in a post entitled 'Fair Use and Misuse'
Here is a very worrisome problem concerning fair use. It has to do with a dichotomy long noted by legal thinkers between the law on the books and the law in action. They often diverge. And fair use is an example of this divergence. As I said in an earlier posting, fair use often benefits rather than harms the copyright holder. However, it doesn't always; moreover, even if a copyright holder is not going to lose, and is even going to gain, sales from a degree of unlicensed copying, if he thinks he can extract a license fee, he'll want to claim that the copying is not fair use; and finally, because the doctrine has vague contours, copyright owners are inclined to interpret it very narrowly, lest it expand by increments.The result is a systematic overclaiming of copyright, resulting in a misunderstanding of copyright's breadth. Look at the copyright page in virtually any book, or the copyright notice at the beginning of a DVD or VHS film recording. The notice will almost always state that no part of the work can be reproduced without the publisher's (or movie studio's) permission. This is a flat denial of fair use. The reader or viewer who thumbs his nose at the copyright notice risks receiving a threatening letter from the copyright owner. He doesn't know whether he will be sued, and because the fair use doctrine is , he may not be altogether confident about the outcome of the suit.
There's lots of other good stuff, too.
Cory Doctorow puts up the transcript of a talk on digital rights management (DRM) that he gave recently at Microsoft:
I'm here today to talk to you about copyright, technology and DRM, I work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation on copyright stuff (mostly), and I live in London. I'm not a lawyer -- I'm a kind of mouthpiece/activist type, though occasionally they shave me and stuff me into my Bar Mitzvah suit and send me to a standards body or the UN to stir up trouble. I spend about three weeks a month on the road doing completely weird stuff like going to Microsoft to talk about DRM.I lead a double life: I'm also a science fiction writer. That means I've got a dog in this fight, because I've been dreaming of making my living from writing since I was 12 years old. Admittedly, my IP-based biz isn't as big as yours, but I guarantee you that it's every bit as important to me as yours is to you.
Here's what I'm here to convince you of:
- That DRM systems don't work
- That DRM systems are bad for society
- That DRM systems are bad for business
- That DRM systems are bad for artists
- That DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT
The BBC will be basing their Creative Archive licensing on Creative Commons:
In a significant step forward towards the opening of a portion of the BBC's archives, the BBC today made their intentions for the Creative Archives clearer to other UK broadcasters and public sector organisations. The Creative Archive, originally announced by Greg Dyke in 2003, plans to offer the British public free access to some of the BBC's audio and video programming.
I'm interested in intellectual property and particularly in how things are playing out in the realms of technology, law, business and creation. I haven't had as much time as I'd like to track the discussion and debate. I do think it's extremely important to remember that creative effort doesn't spring forth in a vacuum, it builds from context, culture, and the creative efforts of earlier artists. It has to build from and access other creations because otherwise we have no tools within ourselves to understand and appreciate it.
Here are some current writings on intellectual property (not comprehensive or anything--things I can across today). Since this is a longish post itself (pointing to even longer things) I'll summarize the links up front:
If you're not familiar with Creative Commons licensing, find more info here.
Suw Charman writes about Lawerence Lessig's new book, Free Culture, which was published simultaneously by Penguin and free online as a PDF file. After publication a group of random interested people decided to create an audio version of the book.
How has all this affected sales of the book? No one really knows yet although it looks successful. However:
Lessig makes the point in Free Culture that easing up on copyright control would result in more creativity. AKMA's audiobook project proved this point clearly and emphatically. Given the legal right to do so, people will build upon a work in unforeseen creative ways. More concisely than any argument within the pages of Free Culture, the audiobook illustrates exactly how much our society loves to create and how impoverished we are when copyright stops this productivity.As AKMA says, "It confirms what Prof. Lessig argues: that there's great positive potential for a culture in which works flourish apart from the throttling constriction of corporate eternal, universal copyright control."
So what does this mean to people who aren't creators:
Of course, you could have come this far and now be thinking 'But, I'm not a writer, I'm not a novelist. How on earth does this affect me?'.Well, if you read books, you're affected by this. If you watch films, you're affected. TV. Radio. All media is affected by this. Trouble is, when the effect in question, the harm, is a matter of what's missing - the work that is not created because the difficulty of clearing rights prevents it - it is harder to measure and quantify. You can't miss what you've never had.
"This is what's so wrong about the view that says 'asking permission is simple'," says Lessig, "because the reality is that clearing rights as such an extraordinary hassle, that most people would never even think of doing it. So that's why making clear the freedoms that are associated with the content first is a great way to get people to participate, and when they do they begin to recognise why the existing system is flawed."
Suw Charman has more good stuff to say in this longish post so go read and ponder.
Timothy Wu has a really long but reportedly really good (I haven't read it all yet) paper on Copyright's Communication Policy which begins:
There is something for everyone to dislike about early twenty-first century copyright. Owners of content say that newer and better technologies have made it easy to pirate. Easy copying, they say, threatens the basic incentive to create new works; new rights and remedies are needed to restore the balance. Academic critics instead complain that a growing copyright give content owners dangerous levels of control over expressive works. In one version of this argument, this growth threatens the creativity and progress that copyright is supposed to foster; in another, it represents an "enclosure movement" that threatens basic freedoms of expression. Copyright, these critics argue, has wandered beyond its proper boundaries. They contend that the balance must be restored.What all these arguments have in common is a focus on copyright's "authorship" function. Copyright policy, in this view, is fundamentally about providing a balance of incentives for authors to effectuate one of several possible goals, such as progress of science, democratic governance, or the sytem of free expression. Few disagree that these are the goals: the main disagreement is over what means serve these ends.
And, finally, Mark Lemley discusses Ex Ante versus Ex Post Justifications for Intellectual Property:
The traditional theory of IP is that the prospect of future reward provides an ex ante incentive to innovate. An increasingly common justification for longer and more powerful IP rights is ex post - that IP will be "managed" most efficiently if control is consolidated in a single owner. This argument is made, for example, in the prospect and rent dissipation literature in patent law, in justifications for expansive rights of publicity, and in defense of the Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Taken to an extreme, this argument justifies perpetual protection with no real exceptions. Those who rely on this theory take the idea of IP as "property" too seriously, and reason that since individual pieces of property are perpetually managed, IP should be too. But IP isn't just like real property; indeed, it gives IP owners control over what others do with their real property. The ex post justification is strikingly anti-market. We would never say today that the market for paper clips would be "efficiently managed" if put into the hands of a single firm. We rely on competition to do that for us. But that is exactly what the ex post theory would do.
First Monday has an article on Copyright and Authors by John Ewing that addresses some of the history and philosphy of copyright law and some of the current issues that we need to address.
The Berkman Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard supported by a grant from the MacArthur Foundation has launched the Digital Media Project :
The Digital Media Project at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, in collaboration with Gartner|G2, the business strategy research arm for Gartner Inc., aims to extend our understanding of the current landscape and unresolved questions related to the distribution, use, and control of digital media. In particular, the Berkman Center and Gartner|G2 are conducting a study of how the shift to digital media (primarily music, movies and books) is affecting the legal and regulatory landscape. The Project will produce a foundational paper identifying the critical features of technological, economic, and legal change that have resulted in the current situation. From there, the project will propose and critically analyze potential legal and business models for the future, with the goal of shedding light on the current directions of digital media distribution on the Internet while balancing the interests of consumers, artists and entertainment companies, and technology manufacturers.
NewScientist.com interviews Harold Varmus about open-access publshing:
The system as it exists has produced many good journals, but journals are expensive and increasingly people are reading and searching online. There's an opportunity here to eliminate boundaries between the individual and the information, and between pieces of information. I think all of us were startled by the incredible power that the internet provided for looking at and working with the genome. If we had published pieces of genomes paper by paper we would be much less far along than we are. That model has been a powerful force in helping people to think about how the scientific literature can be worked with. An important issue is having widespread searching through a public library. That's why we use Public Library of Science, PloS, as our name. We strongly believe in this concept to go to one place and look at everything. But the issues are many. Most of us who are of a certain age grew up at a time when there was essentially no science in the developing world because there was very little access to information. One of my prime motivations is simply getting the information that governments and other philanthropic organisations have paid for into the hands of the people who have a vital interest in seeing it.
...via Dan Gillmor
Jonathan Zittrain writes about the copyright cage at Legal Affairs.
Copyright law was relatively simple when first enacted--don't publish a lot of copies of someone else's stuff. Since then, copyright restrictions have grown into twisted arcane labyrinths:
The limits on behavior enumerated in Title 17 have gone far beyond the wholesale copying of books, maps, and charts covered by the first copyright act of 1790. They extend to computer software, dances, boat hulls (delineated in a 1998 amendment as"the frame or body of a vessel including the deck of a vessel, exclusive of masts, sails, yards, and rigging"), and music—Congress covered performances in 1909 and copies of sound recordings in 1971. What the public can and can't do is described at a level of detail worthy of the most byzantine tax code.For example, bars and restaurants that measure no more than 3,750 square feet (not including the parking lot, as long as the parking lot is used exclusively for parking purposes) can contain no more than four TVs (of no more than 55 inches diagonally) for their patrons to watch, as long as there is only one TV per room. The radio can be played through no more than six loudspeakers, with a limit of four per room, unless the restaurant in question is run by "a governmental body or a nonprofit agricultural or horticultural organization, in the course of an annual agricultural or horticultural fair or exhibition conducted by such body or organization." Then it's OK to use more speakers.
Individual use, however, has until now remained largely untouched. Public copying has traditionally been restrained convenience and conscience. But that has also changed with the introduction of the Internet.
The fact is that the Internet was built to copy things. Microsoft Windows's "Network Neighborhood" feature, for example, is simply a way to swap files. Almost every software application that capitalizes on this central functionality is therefore a Kinko's of sorts, and decreeing all search-and-copy software to be illegal is simply too sweeping a move for a court to make.
Current actions by the RIAA and proposals for draconian laws criminalizing casual copying emphasize the 'broken' nature of the current collection of copyright and intellectual property legislation and court rulings. None of this, though, means that some sort of copyright protection isn't essential:
YES, I HATE THE EFFECTS OF COPYRIGHT ON A DIGITAL REVOLUTION that heralds so much more than the banal ripping off of CD tracks. I hate that creativity is metered and parceled to its last ounce of profit. I hate that our technology is hobbled beyond its paper and other analog counterparts so that it permits us to view but not print, listen but not share, read once but not lend, consume but not create. But I can hate this situation without believing that the idea of copyright is fundamentally flawed. The framers' vision of intellectual property (then known as "monopolies") called for built-in limits to a creator's exclusive rights. A copyright term, for example, would expire even if a work still held commercial value....
I pay my taxes. I have no idea how to calculate them, but I do what Turbotax tells me to. I'll pay a copyright tax, too, and willingly support artists whose work I appreciate, because it's the right thing to do and because it guarantees that more work will be made available to me. I'm not alone. So: Let's imagine a world in which Teddy Ruxpin can say whatever he wants, where kids can play with computers that are not digitally locked down, where bars and restaurants can stop measuring their TVs and their parking lots, and where amateur webcasters can create thousands of radio stations featuring songs we like, perhaps ones that sound familiar but that have new elements to them. We'll still buy concert tickets, books, and CDs and their digital descendants. They'll be competing with a lot more, though—created for fun, even if it happens to turn a profit.
According to a report at news.scotsman.com, it appears that contrary to record company gloom and doom, a new report from Music Research and Programming says:
Music Research and Programming, industry research experts who surveyed 500 serial downloaders aged between 13 and 45, discovered that 87 per cent of those who "try before they buy" would still buy albums when they were commercially released.A total of 91 per cent of file-sharers download individual tracks, but more than two-thirds go on to buy the album, with even the heaviest downloaders saying they like to own real CDs.
Only half of people who download music illegally from the internet believe they are doing something morally wrong. Almost half of the people who responded to the survey were "heavy downloaders" who obtained more than 100 tracks. However, surprisingly, 34 per cent of them said they were buying more music than ever before.
Although 38 per cent of heavy users said they were buying less music, about 28 per cent said their internet activities had not affected the number of CDs they bought in a year.
...via ArtsJournal
Via Gizmodo, comes a report that Korea legislators are considering requiring camerphones to make noise when they take a picture:
Huh Un-na, a ruling Millennium Democratic Party member on the Assembly's Science, Technology, Information and Telecommunications committee said that the party plans to submit a bill mandating that cameraphones be designed to emit a loud noise when photos are taken. The noise would alert people in public that their picture might have been taken.
Gizmodo says that this won't work because there are other cameras people can take secret pictures with that don't make noise. Korean manufacturers say that the restrictions will bring ruin down upon their heads.
I say, think before you take pictures and blast them all over the Internet.
According to CNET news, a judge has found that file-swapping tools are legal.
In an almost complete reversal of previous victories for the record labels and movie studios, federal court Judge Stephen Wilson ruled that Streamcast--parent of the Morpheus software--and Grokster were not liable for copyright infringements that took place using their software. The ruling does not directly affect Kazaa, software distributed by Sharman Networks, which has also been targeted by the entertainment industry."Defendants distribute and support software, the users of which can and do choose to employ it for both lawful and unlawful ends," Wilson wrote in his opinion, released Friday. "Grokster and StreamCast are not significantly different from companies that sell home video recorders or copy machines, both of which can be and are used to infringe copyrights."
...via Dan Gillmor
Eyeteeth has an interview with Sida Vaidhyanathan, an assistant professor of Culture and Communications who wrote The Anarchist in the Library and Copyright and Copywrongs:
This sort of creative circle--the drum circle or the blues-singing circle--is simply the most vivid image we have of these sort of creative communities. These creative communities are all over the place. Anyplace artists gather, any place musicians just jam for the fun of it… I think that this is a powerful form and a powerful habit. It's also an important part of being human. It's the essence of being cultural.
We're not missing those communities; we're just not investing in them and celebrating them like we should. Because the form of cultural production that this country and therefore the world has decided to celebrate, protect and promote is the industrial form. It's the form that says: it's gonna start with a piece of paper by a scriptwriter, it's going to go through a series of meetings, it's going to be produced step by step with the contribution of hundreds or thousands of people with hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars and then be distributed to millions of people, perhaps billions of people, in a form that the institution that produced it dictates.The form of cultural production that this country and therefore the world has decided to celebrate, protect and promote is the industrial form.
Now, all of that in some ways makes our life better. These mass-produced movies are things that human beings value, share, talk about. They become parts of our cultural commerce. They become parts of our cultural life. We quote Star Wars all the time in daily life. We quote Casablanca. And I don't think we want to imagine a world in which there's no incentive to produce Star Wars or Casablanca--although we might imagine a world without Jar-Jar Binks--and we might imagine a world in which someone could write a sequel to Casablanca and not be laughed at (although perhaps that's hard to imagine). Nonetheless, it's this notion of working from the common cultural phenomena that we share to build new and special things. That's what we have to focus on. That's why we need a low barrier of entry to creative processes. That's why we need free and cheap access to cultural materials. Free and cheap access can come a number of ways: through electronic networks, through networks of friends sharing material, through public libraries, through universities, through schools, through churches. These are all institutions built for sharing. One of the things I'm concerned about is this ideology of the industrial production and dissemination of cultural products is infecting some of those institutions as well.
...via BoingBoing
EFF has an information piece on efforts to pass a series of 'super-DMCA' laws in a numer of states throughout the US:
The super-DMCA bills would regulate the possession, development and use of "communication devices" and "unlawful access devices." A "communication device" is virtually any electronic device you might connect to any communication service. The definition of "unlawful communication device" is somewhat narrower, sweeping in any device that is "primarily designed, developed, …possessed, used or offered… for the purpose of defeating or circumventing" a technological protection measure used to protect a communication services.The proposed bills generally prohibit four categories of activity:
1. Possession, development, distribution or use of any "communication device" in connection with a communication service without the express authorization of the service provider.
2. Concealing the origin or destination of any communication from the communication service provider.
3. Possession, development, distribution or use of any "unlawful access device."
4. Preparation or publication of any "plans or instructions" for making any device having reason to know that such a device will be used to violate the other prohibitions.These proposals dramatically expand the power of entertainment companies, ISPs, cable companies and others to control what you can and can't connect to the services that you pay for. If enacted, they will slow innovation, impair competition and seriously undermine a consumer's right to choose what technologies they use in their homes.
Lawrence Lessig reports:
The Mexican Congress is about to consider a revision to its copyright law. Among it many changes, the law will extend the term of copyright from life-plus-70 to life-plus-100. (And no doubt thus beginning yet another cycle of "harmonization" around the world.) Worse, at the end of the copyright term, the government has the right to charge royalties for works in the public domain."Posted by dcoates at 04:50 PM
On March 1st and 2nd, Stanford Law School hosted a conference on Spectrum Policy: Property or Commons?
Spectrum policy is undergoing a fundamental reorientation in the United States and elsewhere. An emerging consensus holds that the traditional system of governmentally-allocated spectrum rights inhibits innovation and competition. The central question now facing policy makers is what form of spectrum management should replace the existing system.
Lots of bloggers at the conference. Links to their takes on the conference can be found on the conference main page.
One of the things that the entertainment industry refers to often in their arguments for digital rights management and broadcast flags and other restrictions on intellectual property and copyright is the idea that digital television will immediately create a world where someone can 'beam' their friends the latest movie 'just like that.'
Raffi Krikorian has done some testing of this idea and sent the following comments to the FCC in response to their request for public comment on the proposed broadcast flag for digital television:
The initial comments of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), et al., in this docket, assert that the Digital Television (DTV) transition will create a series of risks to their intellectual property interests, and propose the "broadcast flag" in order to address those risks. They provide a laundry-list of new risks from clear-text free-over-the-air Advanced Television Standards Committee (ATSC) broadcasts, including the prospect of redistribution of captured ATSC programming by:electronic mail
"shared folders"
a web site, and by
P2P networked file-sharing software6As a skilled and experienced technologist, I greeted these claims with immense skepticism as they seemed at direct odds with my longtime experience with designing, deploying, and using P2P and networked applications. In response to my skepticism, I undertook a series of experiments in recording and attempting to redistribute ATSC terrestrial broadcast programming. The results of my research are presented below
...
What should be noted is that all the numbers presented in this paper exhibit a linear relationship between program length and file size (or program length and transfer time). So, a four-hour recording is about twice as large, and takes about twice as long to copy, as a two-hour recording. The 43 GB file is for a five-hour recording, which means that a one-hour recording occupies about 8.6 GB of space -- this still means that it would take
a full day for a hour our television show to move out of my house network (because a standard broadband connection only has a 200 kilobit/sec upload speed instead of my 800 kilobit/sec upload -- this means an average customer would take 4 full days to ship out),
6116 floppy disks,
14 CD-Rs, or
2 DVDs
to transmit or to hold all the data received over the air. This is still impractical for routine transfers of a short television program, and, in the case of recordable media, still implies a significant media cost and recording time.In this document, I have shown that the MPAA's view of the capabilities of current and foreseeable networking technologies is misinformed; they have provided a series of reasons to argue that their intellectual property will be distributed more readily as a result of ATSC terrestrial broadcast service than it is presently today, and I have stated why, in my opinion, I deem this to be incorrect and actually impossible. I conclude that there is no practical evidence that an ATSC broadcast flag mandate would address a real problem.
A judge has ordered Network Associates to Judge orders Network Associates to revamp license agreement
A New York judge has ordered Network Associates to stop placing restrictions on what its customers can say about its products, in a case involving a Network World review of one of its products.
The Supreme Court decided 7-2 to uphold the Copyright Extension Act passed in 1998. This act extended copyright 20 additional years and was applied retroactively, removing some works from the public domain on which copyright had already expired.
Dan Gillmor has an excellent journal article on the decision:
Like public lands and the oceans, the public domain is controlled by no one -- a situation that infuriates people who believe that nothing can have value unless some person or corporation owns it. The public domain is the pool of knowledge from which new art and scholarship have arisen over the centuries.The Constitution talks about granting rights to creators of ''science and useful arts'' but only for limited periods. After that, the works can be used freely by anyone.
At the end of the article he also has links to Lawrence Lessig's blog (the lawyer who argued the case before the Supreme court) and the court documents, including dissenting opinions from Justices Stevens and Breyer.
Giving power to people who traditionally haven't had much power, tends to make those with power nervous.
Arnold Kling has an article at TCS-Tech Control Station about how companies are responding to the interactive and creative power that the Internet and the web have given large numbers of people. He says:
There is a striking generation gap between media empires that were built before the Internet and those that grew up as Web businesses. Companies that were formed on the Internet treat Edge Power as a feature. Traditional media companies treat Edge Power as a bug.
A recent article in the Chronicle describes Edward Felten, a computer science professor at Princeton and his increasing involvement in intellectual property issues:
After taking on the recording industry in a high-profile lawsuit that he eventually lost, he spent the 2001-2 academic year at Stanford University, where he studied cyberlaw with help from Lawrence Lessig, the guru of the field and a master at using the news media to relay his message. Now Mr. Felten is writing a book, meant for both computer scientists and a general audience, about how tinkering is crucial to scientific discovery. And his Web log (at http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com) calls attention to people's opinions about the regulation of technology.
Among the interesting things about Edward Felten's involvement is that he's one of a growing number of researchers and communicators who are using weblogs. Felten says:
Mr. Felten says Freedom to Tinker allows him to refine his thinking about technology and law without going through the traditional academic-publishing process. "I get a surprising number of really good, thoughtful comments from people I've never heard of," he says. "I've access to these ideas ... which I never would have had otherwise."
PubScience, a site run by the Department of Energy that made available information on government and academic science research shut down recently.
Here's Dan Gillmor's take.
Check out this new weblog on creativity and innovation....
The Supreme Court heard arguments last week on the copyright extension case, Eldred v Ashcroft. Lawerence Lessig has a post mortem on the actual court appearance on his web log.
Kevin Kelly has an opinion piece, Making My Own Music, in the New York Times (note: you have to register to access NY Times articles, but registration is free). Kelly discusses the hearing by the Supreme Court of Ashcroft v. Eldred, a case protesting the most recent extension of copyright protection.
Under the current copyright regime, short-term profit outweighs long-term value. As copyright protection lurches toward perpetuity, America's cultural heritage %u2014 in whatever media %u2014 is increasingly becoming the property of corporate copyright holders. But it belongs to all of us. Technology has given fans the means to enhance and protect this common heritage. The law should give them the right.
Copyright is important. It gives creators the right to control the use of the their creations for a limited amount of time. But the public domain is important to. It affects how we learn and grow and build from the past and create new discoveries for the future.
Here's a transcript of Lawerence Lessig's keynote address at OSCon. If you want to know what he had to say (and it's good stuff) but don't want to download the complete presentation done up in Flash (which weighs in at a hefty 8.5 Mb) this is a good place to go.
The starting points from which Lessig discusses intellectual property, copyright, and why we should care, are these:
Edward Felten, a professor at Princeton, says at Economist.com, that all of us have a right to tinker with the things we own. Tinkering has traditionally led to innovation and progress.
Further, he says:
“We construct the world by observing it and interacting with it, not just by letting things control us....You can't learn to write only by reading.” And just as tinkering with words leads to new ideas, he explains, so does tinkering with technology. It is a necessary first step to innovation. Being able to reverse-engineer software, for instance, is a necessary first step for writing better programs.
The Digital Millenium Copyright Act is being invoked to keep researchers from doing research on security issues, from looking closely at the way hardware and software tools are constructed, and, critically, from talking about what they find. In addition, companies are increasingly selling us licenses to products rather than ownership of the products themselves. Our freedom to use things as we would want to use them is eroding.
Felten has a blog now at: Freedom to Tinker
Singer-songwriter Janis Ian has a couple of excellent articles online: The Internet Debacle--An Alternative View and Fallout--a follow up to The Internet Debacle.
The Internet Debacle discusses her take on copyright and online file sharing (music sharing). She questions the music industry claims that music downloading is destroying the industry and cites examples from her experience and that of others.
In Fallout, she continues the discussion, talking about the feedback she's received, the effects making her own music available on the web has had on sales (positive) and she suggests some alternatives to the music industry to address the issues of copyright and music's availability.
I'm adding a new category on intellectual property because I think it's going to be one of the defining issues in the next few years for the Internet and computers. It's a complex issue with lots of room for discussion, reinterpretation, and reinvention.
Among the questions: What intellectual property ought to be part of the commons and the common good? And what intellectual property ought to be protected so that creators can reap a fair return for their labors? How should these protections be applied? What are the intended and unintended consequences of what we do? Who gets to be involved in the discussion?
One interesting place to begin, if you're interested in this issue is the Creative Commons website. Creative Commons is:
...a non-profit organization founded on the notion that some people would prefer to share their creative works (and the power to copy, modify, and distribute their works) instead of exercising all of the restrictions of copyright law.
Creative Commons is working on ways for creators to make clear what rights they want to keep and what rights they are willing to make available to others (like copying, distributing, etc.)