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]
DENVER
-- The manner in which copyright law is being applied to academe in the
digital age is destructive to the advancement of human knowledge and
culture, and higher education is doing nothing about it.
That is
what Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard University law professor and renowned
open-access advocate, told a theater of higher ed technologists
Thursday at the 2009 Educause Conference here. In his talk, Lessig
described how digital and Web technology has exploded the conditions
under which copyright law had been written.
“If copyright law, at its core, regulates something called ‘copies,’
then in the analog world… many uses of culture were copyright-free,” he
explained. “They didn’t trigger copyright law, because no copy was
made. But in the digital world, very few uses are copyright-free
because in the digital world … all uses produce a copy.”
The
paradigm for copyright law enforcement emerged out of this "analog
world" as a way of ensuring authors were remunerated for their
contributions to culture, thereby creating an incentive to make further
contributions and drive the progress on human art and discovery
forward, he said.
Times have since changed, said Lessig, but the letter of the law hasn’t.
Copyright
law was originally intended to protect those who create for profit
(Lessig used the example of recording artist Britney Spears). But
academics also create original works, he said, and they are — or should
be — motivated by a desire to advance human knowledge, not line their
pockets. Therefore, sealing their work behind copyright barriers does
no social good.
“If there’s a business model of science, or a
business model of education,” Lessig said, “that depends upon sharing,
depends upon sharing resources in common and that builds upon that
common set of resources — how does the paradigm case help that business
model?”
It does to an extent, Lessig allowed. Absolute open
access does weaken the incentive to create insofar as scholars crave
some tangible remuneration for their commercially published works. The
solution to the problem, he said, probably lies in hybrid systems such
as Creative Commons, of which he is a board member. Creative Commons
licenses allow authors to designate what portions of their work can be
copied and how it may be used, thereby avoiding the “thicket” of the
copyright system — where, Lessig said, things are never nearly that
simple.
Lessig cited several examples of how copyright law in academe has
hampered the pursuit of knowledge: neurologists who were unable to
aggregate data for a large-scale brain-mapping project due to copyright
restrictions; filmmakers who faced staggering costs re-clearing
copyrights on images they used in a civil-rights documentary series
when they wanted to release it on DVD. He even recounted a recent
incident in which he had been using a medical information Web site to
try to diagnose his ill daughter, when he noticed a note that said
portions of an article he was reading had been redacted under copyright
law.
“What we need to do is to act to avoid this thicket,” he
said, “at least where it’s clear this thicket doesn’t give us anything
good.”
Academics — presumably stakeholders in the effort to
advance knowledge — have been uncharacteristically and disturbingly
silent on the copyright “insanity” that has befallen the information
trade, Lessig said.
“We should see a resistance to imposing the
Britney Spears model of copyright upon the scientist or the educator,”
he said. “…But if you would expect that, you would be very disappointed
by what we see out there in the scientific and and education
communities.” Scholars, he said, have allowed the copyright
conversation to be steered by lawyers and businesses who are not first
and foremost to intellectual discovery.
To them, Lessig delivered a simple message: “Stop it.”
Unfortunately, not everyone has access to the scholarly literature,
despite advances in communications technology. The high cost of
academic journals restricts access to knowledge; in some fields, prices
can reach $20,000 for a single journal subscription1 or $30 for an individual article.2
Despite these high prices, authors of scholarly articles are not paid
for their work. The profits from these publications go solely to the
publishers of the journals. A vast amount of research is funded from
public sources – yet taxpayers are locked out by the cost of access.
Learning and inquiry are impeded when scholars lack access to
fellow researchers’ work, and when students lack access to the work of
scholars before them.
At the same time, digital technologies have opened new opportunities
for research. New tools facilitate faster discoveries, speed the
development of new technologies, and accelerate the progress of
science. Patients could have access to the latest medical research,
citizens could evaluate scientific information on environmental
impacts, and developing countries could apply the most recent
scholarship to public health and development efforts.3 But access barriers leave these opportunities under-explored.
Open Access is an alternative to the traditional closed, subscription-access system of scholarly communication. Open
Access makes the results of scholarly research available online for
free, immediately upon publication, and removes barriers for scholarly
and educational re-use.4 Entire journals can be open-access,
or an author can provide Open Access to an individual article by
posting a copy on an openly accessible Web site. All forms of
open-access publication depend on rigorous methods of quality control,
including peer review.
Open Access has achieved remarkable success to date: more than 4,000 open-access journals are published today;5 millions of articles are made available via open-access repositories;6 and dozens of policies from universities and research funders support Open Access;7 but still more needs to be done.
We, the undersigned student organizations, hereby endorse Open
Access as the preferred model for scholarly communication, because:
(a) Open Access improves the educational experience.
All students, regardless of their institution’s ability to afford
subscriptions, should have access to the full scholarly record, whether
for assigned reading, research for a term paper, or literature review
for a dissertation.
(b) Open Access democratizes access to research. Students
from around the world should have full access to the scholarly
literature, along with patients looking for medical information and
citizens seeking to learn about the environment or other scientific
topics.
(c) Open Access advances research. Open Access
helps researchers be more productive by facilitating access to the
latest studies. Open Access also enables new techniques for
computer-assisted research, paving the way for scientific advancements.
(d) Open Access improves the visibility and impact of scholarship. Today’s
student is tomorrow’s scholar. Recent studies suggest that Open Access
articles are downloaded and cited more frequently than articles that
are accessible only through subscription.8 Open Access fulfills researchers’ professional responsibility to maximize the impact of their research.
We hereby:
Call upon UNIVERSITIES to support Open Access
We believe universities should adopt policies that ensure Open
Access to their faculty’s research, such as the policies adopted at
Harvard University9 and Stanford University.10
Call upon GOVERNMENTS AND RESEARCH FUNDERS to support Open Access
We believe research agencies should adopt policies that ensure Open
Access to publicly funded research, such as that of the National
Institutes of Health11 and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.12
We believe charitable funders likewise should adopt policies that
ensure Open Access to their funded research, such as that of Autism
Speaks13 and the Canadian Cancer Society.14
Call upon RESEARCHERS to support Open Access
We believe researchers should publish in Open Access journals,
and/or deposit their peer-reviewed manuscripts in Open Access
repositories.15
Commit to support Open Access in our activities
We will undertake activities, in our membership and on our
campuses, to educate students about Open Access and to engage them in
efforts supporting Open Access.
American Medical Student Association (June 10, 2009) Student PIRGs (June 10, 2009) Students for Free Culture (June 10, 2009) Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (June 10, 2009) California Institute of Technology Graduate Student Council (June 10, 2009) Trinity University Association of Student Representatives (June 10, 2009)
I was lucky enough to catch Larry Lessig's talk "Copyright Wars," at the Sophiensaele on my last night in Berlin. It was sponsored by the Heinrich Boll Foundation.
I finally got a chance to watch this great documentary on my flight home from Berlin yesterday -- perfectly fitting after participating in the ECLA State of the World Week conference on the Politics of Cultural Ownership, and then catching the surprise talk by Lessig at the Sophiensaele along with some of "my" students on my last night in town.
(I'll be remixing some screen grabs from this film for my powerpoint keynote at Iona College's inaugural Conference on Intellectual Property in June -- more on that soon!)
When it comes to remix culture, copyfight and crowd-sourcing, Brett
Gaylor walks the walk. The director of “open source documentary” RiP: A Remix Manifesto
released his feature-length film under a Creative Commons license and
even adopted Radiohead’s name-your-own-price business model when he
made the movie available online.
“We’ve gone to really great lengths to make this film as accessible
as possible,” Gaylor explained in an e-mail interview conducted after
announcing the download Monday. “It’s already on the Pirate Bay, and
that’s great — it’s another delivery format. We didn’t put it there
ourselves, though; we didn’t need to. Had we gone that route, it’s
fairly likely, given the realities of the film-distribution universe,
that we wouldn’t have these other opportunities to get the film to
people who still watch TV, rent DVDs or go to movies, which is, in
fact, most people. We wanted those people to watch this movie.”
Featuring mashup artist Girl Talk and luminaries like Lawrence Lessig, Gilberto Gil and Cory Doctorow, RiP: A Remix Manifesto debuted in Amsterdam and Canada last year and in North America last month. It opens theatrically Friday in New York.
The movie’s compelling analysis of sampling, sharing and
copyfighting was pieced together over six years, during which Gaylor
shared his raw footage with other filmmakers, some of whose remixes he
spliced into the film. Given the realities of remix culture, where
there is no such thing as a final cut, Gaylor subsequently offered the
movie online as a remix experiment at Open Source Cinema, which he founded and beta-launched in 2004.
Since then, the little doc that could has nabbed awards, screened at
panels and walked the tightrope between theatrical and internet
distribution, original art and open-sourced amalgam, without falling
off.
Gaylor talks about copyfight crusaders, the trials and tribulations
of the distribution war, and the joys of messing with the media.
RiP: A Remix Manifesto director Brett Gaylor asks fans to pay what they will for his downloadable doc. Photo: Mila Aung-Thwin
Wired.com: The pay-what-you-want initiative makes
perfect sense for this film, but I’m betting it wasn’t easy to pull off
from a business perspective.
Brett Gaylor: It’s been a peculiar road to get to
the point where we could release the film as a download, because
obviously this is something we wanted to do right from the get go. But
since we have so many partners that helped us make the film, including
theatrical and television distributors, it was a delicate balancing act
to make sure the good faith they showed in making the film would be
rewarded, that we wouldn’t undercut their efforts to promote and recoup
on the film by giving it away. So we waited a while before launching
the various online permutations. The National Film Board [of Canada]
put up a chaptered version during our U.S. premiere at South by
Southwest in March, and we embedded calls to action into each chapter.
Around SXSW, we partnered with two American partners —
Disinformation for our DVD release, and BSide for the theatrical side
of things. And at the first meeting I had with them, it became clear
that we needed to go down this road. We knew the film would appear on
file-sharing networks immediately and we knew the audience for the film
wanted and expected it to be online. So knowing that, we wanted there
to be a method for those who wanted to pay to do so.
Wired.com: Are you satisfied with the arrangement so far?
Gaylor: It’s still not moving as fast as I’d
ultimately like. The pay-what-you-can is at the moment just available
for those in the U.S., while some of the other world territories do
their thing theatrically or on DVD. And we, being the National Film
Board of Canada, and our production company EyeSteelFilm, want those
territories to be able to have a chance to define their own business
model, so it’s fair. Its been a lot of tricky e-mails.
Wired.com: How has the theatrical run gone, and how are you feeling about the New York City opening?
Gaylor: The theatrical run so far has been amazing.
In Canada, it played literally coast to coast, and there is something
immensely satisfying as a filmmaker to see your film’s title on a
marquee and have people watch it together on a big screen. We went to a
lot of lengths for it to work well in that format; it’s got big sound,
beautiful graphics and animation, and the cinematographer Mark Ellam did an amazing job.
It’s also really challenging to engage the public in theaters,
because you’re playing your film to this broad demographic. We had
people in the lineups at the AMC trying to decide if they’d go see Benjamin Button
or this crazy copyright remix movie, so that was a surreal pleasure. It
also generated a ton of press for the film, mostly great, but the film
enraged the right-wing papers in the country who took a lot of umbrage
with its central themes.
Battle lines over free culture are drawn in this RiP collage, entitled Copyright vs. Copyleft.
Wired.com: Tell us about the New York screening, which coincides with a panel from the Open Video Alliance about standards and practices.
Gaylor: We’re doing a sneak preview on Friday and
then following up with the launch at the Open Video Conference, which
I’m extremely excited to participate in. I was part of the initial
planning sessions for this group back in the fall, and it really feels
like a culmination of all this disparate work that has been going on in
the free culture world for years. Filmmakers, free software geeks,
remixers, lawyers, academics — all these different people who have been
working on these parallel tracks are starting to feed their work into
one another, and I find it incredibly inspiring. So it will be an honor
to show the film there. It’s a tough crowd, too!
Wired.com: What are your thoughts on the future of open video?
Gaylor: I’m generally optimistic about it. There
are a lot of challenges, for sure: Lack of universal standards,
third-party rights, bandwidth, access for the developing world, and a
lack of basic media literacy among users. On the flip side, I think the
internet will very quickly overtake TV as the content-delivery medium
of choice, and with that comes the opportunity for a genuine
participatory experience. I think the time is now for developing the
tools, standards and practices to make sure we don’t just see TV 2.0.
Party music remix champ Greg Gillis, aka Girl Talk, fights the good copyfight in RiP: A Remix Manifesto. Photo: Andrew Strasser
Wired.com: Talk about working with Girl Talk’s
Gregg Gillis and Negativland’s Mark Hosler on this film and its various
openings. What role have both played in the evolution of remix culture?
Gaylor: Working with Gregg was a lot of fun. One of
the reasons I wanted to include him in the film is because he doesn’t
see himself as a copyright crusader. He’s a serious musician whose work
points out a lot of flaws, contradictions and challenges in current
copyright law. The fact that he’s been able to reach such a level of
success without a lawsuit has created a lot of elbow room for musicians.
When you think about Negativland,
which had a fairly major lawsuit filed against them over a decade ago,
it’s obvious that things are changing. Negativland had a huge influence
on my life. Watching it take such an intelligent, activist stance was
very inspiring, and you could tell they were taking such joy in fucking
with the media. It was something I looked at and said, “Yeah, I could
do that! I want to do that!”
Wired.com: How about Lessig and Doctorow?
Gaylor: Their writing put some meat on the bones,
and framed the debate for a whole generation of copyright activists.
For a lot of people, it was like suddenly realizing: “That’s what kind
of activist I am.”
Wired.com: You’ve said in your blog that
“theatrical distribution is a war.” Can you elaborate? And what does
internet distribution, legal and otherwise, offer in terms of an olive
branch?
Gaylor: It’s a war in that you have to do so much
to get the proverbial butts in the seats. It’s extremely costly and the
stakes are high, whereas I think the internet gives some opportunities
to speak directly to an audience. With RiP, we tried to have
the best of both worlds. It was important that folks who weren’t
exposed to these issues were able to see it, but we also wanted to try
and lower the friction as much as possible to those who were active
online and who would really see themselves in the film.
Wired.com: Now that you’ve made a film on these
issues, has your mind changed about intellectual property or ownership?
What’s the tightrope there?
Gaylor: The classic copyright ones: Providing an
incentive, while at the same time ensuring the public’s access to the
work. Ultimately, that’s what I, and most people in this movement, are
pushing for — a balance. So the film release was a lot more “free as in
speech” than it was “free as in beer,” because it was important for me
that average folks could see the film on TV or in theaters. And
eventually, after a limited term (measured in months!), the film will
fall into the public/pirate domain and be copied freely.
Wired.com: Do you envision a day when theatrical distribution is a dinosaur, and we’re all paying to stream films online?
Gaylor: We’ll see how I feel about that in a year.
The remixing is just starting to take off, and I envision a time when
these sorts of interactions will create an environment where a
theatrical screening is to filmmakers what live performances are to
musicians. The ability to create something unique for a particular
screening or event allows you to offer an added value to that audience
member, as well as have something unique that’s different from what you
can get on a DVD or online.
Legal
scholar and copyright reform advocate Lawrence Lessig was unhappy to
discover that one of his presentations on YouTube was hit with a bogus
DMCA takedown notice from Warner Music. Lessig intends to fight back
and give Warner some schooling on fair use.
By
Ryan Paul
| Last updated April 29, 2009 9:05 AM CT
Lawrence Lessig, the well-known legal scholar and copyright reform advocate who founded Creative Commons, was surprised to discover that Warner Music issued a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notice against one of his presentations on YouTube.
Lessig, who is a leading expert on the legal principle of fair use and an outspoken critic of DMCA abuse, intends to fight the takedown notice.
Warner Music just flunked out of common sense 101 and is about to get
some unpleasant remedial schooling from the irate professor.
The growing volume of infringing content on YouTube has made it a
major target for DMCA takedown notices. Unfortunately, the content
producers that are flooding the site with takedowns are rarely taking
adequate steps to ensure the validity of their claims and are
indiscriminately targeting videos that fall within the boundaries of
fair use.
In some cases, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and other organizations have stepped in
and filed lawsuits against takedown abusers in an effort to protect
fair use. Such efforts are time-consuming and often fraught with
difficulty. It's pretty clear that the content companies aren't really
getting the message, as their claims continue to descend into increasingly ludicrous territory.
Big content believes
that it should be permissible to issue takedowns whenever it wants,
regardless of whether the content is fair use, and that there should be
no consequences or liability for doing so, even when the basis for the
takedown is clearly bogus.
Lessig is strongly committed to educating the public, lawmakers, and
the content industry about the importance of protecting fair use from
DMCA abuses, so it seems likely that he will take advantage of Warner's
mistake to raise awareness of the issue. The fact that the notice was
issued at all serves as yet another reminder of how easily the barrage
of poorly considered DMCA takedowns can hit innocent bystanders.
Hat tip to TechDirt for first noticing the tweets.
