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A Search for Comity in the Intellectual Property Wars: symposium at The New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, April 28-30, 2006 [slides, audio, transcripts]
Will Fair Use Survive? Free Expression in the Age of Copyright Control, by Marjorie Heins and Tricia Beckles.
download the report [PDF]
Via Lumen Consulting:
In the hopes of creating awareness of what CISPA actually is and how it could effect the lives of every day people, we created this infographic. Feel free to share the graphic on your site (embed code below). You can find quotes from Fortune 500 CEO’s who are endorsing the bill here. You can also write a letter to your local representative to protest CISPA here.
Full Infographic and CISP definition is here.
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Image via v.max1978 (flickr)
In a recent conversation I had about sharing books, and the difficulty of engaging in such basic activities as sharing posed by e-books, my acquaintance went so far as to describe the book -- the old-school printed kind -- as a nearly perfect technology. He may be right. As a user and lover of Kindle, as well as a reader and lover of printed books, this sharing problem continues to rankle:
via Defective By Design:
Amazon Kindle extinguishes the fire of learning
Posted On: Wed, 2011-09-28 11:59 by mattl
Amazon came out with their newest line of Kindle ebook readers today, including the appropriately named "Kindle Fire".
To quote their TV commercial: "The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all."
This device does not kindle that fire -- it extinguishes it, with more of the same digital restrictions.
Let's look at the facts:
Amazon claims you have no right to sell or share the books you buy. They advertise a "lending" feature which, at best, allows you to lend a book one time ever, to one person, who must also be a Kindle user. You don't get to make the decision about whether you can lend a book or not -- the publisher and Amazon do. That's not sharing.
In fact, when people tried to cooperate to make large-scale use of the lending function, Amazon shut them down. The most prominent example of this was the web site Lendle, which is back up now, albeit with fewer features, including a feature which made it easy to lend the books you have without typing in all the titles -- a move forced on them by Amazon to discourage sharing.
The power exerted over its users, arbitrarily blocking lending of books and remotely removing books, is unacceptable even if they later change their minds or promise to stop doing it.
Amazon is working its way into public libraries and schools now, subverting the functioning of the very places they, in the above quote, claim to support.
Via the wireless connectivity of these devices, Amazon can hold data about everything you read.
Also via the connectivity, Amazon can delete books from Kindles. They have already done this multiple times. They say they won't do it anymore, but they make users sign an agreement which still gives them the authority to. They have demonstrated only reasons to doubt their word.
Although it is possible to use the Kindle for DRM-free materials, that is not the system that Amazon is promoting or working most actively toward. Funding Amazon's work in this area, even if you use it differently, is supporting their moves at limiting sharing and access to books.
The result: More of the same: A major threat to the shareability -- like fire -- that has enabled human culture and knowledge to advance.
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Cory Doctorow @ SIGGRAPH
via BoingBoing:
...keynote address at the ACM SIGGRAPH conference in Vancouver, BC. The event's organizers were kind enough to record and release my video to their YouTube channel. My talk was about the way that copyright can be made to work for creators in the digital age, and why it's important for everyone that we don't get it wrong.
SIGGRAPH 2011 : Cory Doctorow's Keynote Address
More via Art, Revolution & Ownership Blog:
Copyright, Cory Doctorow and me
By Martha Rans on August 15, 2011 – 9:14am
Last week I was fortunate to find myself at SIGGRAPH and see Cory Doctorow’s keynote. It was inspiring. To have him here in Vancouver as we make the final preparations for “Art, Revolution and Ownership” lit the fire under me to get writing again. Here are some excerpts of what he said:
Here in the digital age, we copy like we breathe, and so the stakes for getting the rules right on copyright have never been higher
So today, let’s get beyond “Copyright good/copyright bad” arguments and dig into the meatier questions:
“What do we want copyright to do, and which copyright will do that stuff?”
Let’s start with something everyone in this room should be able to agree with: copyright should serve as an incentive to creativity. A good copyright system results in more people making more creations. One of copyright’s most important goals is serving creators.
Cory (from my pov) demands that we differentiate the industry from creators and understand that what is being done under the guise of copyright does not serve creators. This should be obvious but for whatever reason the media often lump the industry together with artists suggesting that many creators agree with their views on drm when that is simply not the case. Many of the unions, guilds and association have disagreed with the industry position on some aspects of Bill C-32. They are lost in the copyright/left debate which rages in the blogosphere to little constructive effect. As I have said before, many creators feel shut out of the conversation because the system does not serve their interests.
Cory offers an eloquent and informed reminder on the need for us to develop better (more innovative?) ways to ensure remuneration for creators. “We need intermediaries who can provide the plumbing through which our works flow, because without them, we have to bear the costs of creation and distribution and most of us can’t do that.” What I take that to mean is that WE have the obligation to work a little harder at answering the what do we want copyright to do question.
More analysis via Rhizome:
We Copy Like We Breathe: Cory Doctorow's SIGGRAPH 2011 Keynote
When Cory Doctorow started his Keynote speech at this year's SIGGRAPH conference he started bravely by granting the audience "unequivocal permission to record video, audio, and to use those recordings ... in all media now known or yet to be invented throughout the known universe." This past Wednesday, two days after the speech, the Keynote was available on YouTube.
In the speech, Doctorow, co-editor of Boing Boing, outlined copyright and digital rights management's current state of affairs by providing details and examples that took the conversation far beyond the typically polarized copyright debate that divides the analysis into two mutually exclusive parts - either bad or good.
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Image Via
I can't say it enough: Ron Coleman is awesome. Here's his latest on the creepy scary thing being touted as the 'PROTECT IP Act', from his blog, Likelihood of Confusion:
July 7, 2011
The PROTECT IP Act: We’re all infringers now
By Ron Coleman
Glenn Reynolds links to this story: Dozens of law professors: PROTECT IP Act is unconstitutional:
An ideologically diverse group of 90 law professors has signed a letter opposing the PROTECT IP Act, the Hollywood-backed copyright enforcement/Internet blacklist legislation now working its way through Congress. The letter argues that its domain-blocking provisions amount to Internet censorship that is barred by the First Amendment.
Jointly authored by Mark Lemley, David Levine, and David Post, the letter is signed not only by prominent liberals like Larry Lessig and Yochai Benkler, but also by libertarians like Post and Glenn “Instapundit”Reynolds.
“The Act would allow courts to order any Internet service to stop recognizing [a] site even on a temporary restraining order… issued the same day the complaint is filed,” they write. Such a restraining order, which they describe as “the equivalent of an Internet death penalty,” raises serious constitutional questions.
Yep. I argued much the same thing here a while ago, and I’m only a former law professor. (Ahem… adjunct.)
Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows that the encroachment of Big IP on the right of free expression — commercial or otherwise — has been my central theme. And within that theme, I have consistently pointed out that the existing legal rules, especially in copyright, are already hopelessly skewed wrong.
Online counterfeiting and copyright infringement are serious problems, but this new proposed law is a terrible way to try to solve them. Its passage would only drive the culture further yet from any respect for the rule of law as it applies to intellectual property. But if Big IP hasn’t figured out yet that it is cultural acceptance of legal norms, not fear of punishment, that makes a free society a law-abiding one — if Big IP doesn’t understand what the de facto attitude of consumers regarding copyright has already become, and where it is already going — then heck, maybe at this point the law professors and the rest of us should just let Congress already go ahead and give them enough rope.
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I linked to this article in an earlier post, but I think it's well worth reblogging here in full.
via Creative Destruction (from the vaults):
Posted on 19. Jun, 2009 by refe in INNOVATION
Creative culture is on the rise, thanks largely to recent technology. Anybody can shoot a video or record a song and upload it to YouTube and millions of people might see it. Digital technology has put the arts back into the hands of the people.
Copyright lawyer and chairman of Creative Commons Larry Lessig gave a presentation about a year and a half ago in which he talks about the way that the younger generation’s perception of creativity and copyright has changed since their parents’. This generation has the tools and the desire to remix, mash-up and recreate the music they hear and the videos they watch and turn them into something new. The way they appreciate art is by engaging with it and making it their own.
Lessig suggests that the law has not greeted “this new use of culture using digital technologies” with much common sense. Common sense would have been to realize that times have changed, that digital technology has fundamentally altered the way that consumers and creators alike are able to produce, enjoy and interact with art. Common sense would have been for entities like the RIAA to acknowledge that fact and adapt business practices to be remain competitive in the emerging market.
Of course, that’s not what happened. Instead, “the architecture of copyright law and the architecture digital technologies as they interact have produced the presumptionthat these activities are illegal.” Lessig continues, “because if copyright law at it’s core regulates something called ‘copies’ than in the digital world the one fact we can’t escape is that every single use of digital technology produces a copy. Every single use therefore requires permission. Without permission you are a trespasser.”
So this presumption that remixes, mash-ups, videos or any other fan created content that uses copyrighted material are illegal has made nearly an entire generation guilty of breaking the law. I love it that he uses the word presumption – this is one of the foremost lawyers on copyright saying that what the RIAA believes about copyright law is not correct.
The RIAA has seen the internet and digital technology as a threat to their business, and responded by taking an extreme position regarding copyright law. This exaggerated version of copyright all but ignores the concept of fair-use and considers – wrongly – that every use of copyrighted material is illegal.
So they crack down, launching a huge legal offensive against just about everybody, including individual consumers suspected of violating their interpretation of copyright law. This in turn creates a growing backlash – both among those whose genuinely illegal activities were thwarted, and those whose legitimate fair-use was wrongly lumped together with piracy. Now the world is experiencing a “growing copyright abolitionism” says Lessig, “a generation that rejects the very notion of what copyright is supposed to do … and believes that the law is nothing more than an ass to be ignored and to be fought at every opportunity possible. The extremism on one side begets extremism on the other – a fact we should have learned many, many times over.”
You and I can’t control the RIAA. They have proven that they are out of touch with today’s digital culture and determined to snuff out any innovation that smells like it might disrupt the traditional models. We can influence the other side of the table, though.
Artists don’t have to get in bed with the RIAA. The new independent, DIY approach to a career in music is not just a pipe dream anymore – there are plenty of success stories to look to now. In this new marketplace the artists who recognize the value of openness will be the ones who succeed. The ones who see the benefit of allowing their fans to remix their tracks, or to produce amateur videos for their songs and spread them across the Internet.
Regardless of what we have been taught to believe recently, there is such a thing as fair use, and it’s in the artist’s best interests to allow it. [emphasis newsgrist's] Release your music under a more open license such as Creative Commons and see what happens. Let your fans do the promoting – if you give them a quality product and the freedom to use it the way they want use it they’ll do a surprisingly good job. Better than you could ever do, maybe even with a big-label marketing budget that only the top acts see anyway.
Thanks to Eugenia for the video.
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