Category: Copyright

Copyrights That No One Knows About Don’t Help Anyone – New York Times

I’ll admit to feeling slightly mislead by the title of this piece.  I had expected to read about how the average Joe’s lack of knowledge of copyright law hinders its effectiveness. Instead, the title addresses how the copyright on an old (out of print) work isn’t of public benefit. The author rightly argues along with Lessig for bringing back a registration system along with the proposals to loosen rights on “orphaned” works.

What these proposals would accomplish is to bring some certainty to questions we commonly face in the digital world: “Is this work protected by copyright?” or “Does the owner want to exercise control to profit from this work?”

Anything that can be done to bring more clarity to the law should be promoted.

The Battle Over Music Piracy – Time

Time has an interesting piece which says what few (other than the occasional undergraduate in the student newspaper) might be willing to admit: “Almost everybody owns a little stolen music.” It also poses a question, which I would argue has an empirical answer: “Can consumers be trusted to control their own music without pirating the record labels and the artists they produce right into the ground?”

This is a classic case of what I would like to call the 3 types of code coming together (a la Lessig in Code 2.0).

• East Coast code: the written law of copyright (also known as the”law on the books”).
• West coast code: the “law” of DRM, which has the potential to make people follow the laws on the books (or other laws) without their knowledge.
• Midwest code: the ways in which the laws becomes created by the actions its subjects (also known as “law in action”).

In this case, the author is, I believe, accurately capturing the interplay between each type and how it ends up eventually working in the market.

Consumers feel [Midwest code] retailers are treating them like potential copyright criminals. Retailers say they use DRM [West Coast code] only because the labels make them. The labels blame us, the customers, for being such filthy music pirates [of East Coast code]. And around we go.

While consumers may technically be breaking the law by downloading music, I think that looking more closely at the question of if they can be “trusted” might answer some important questions about how and why people do and don’t comply with the law of copyright.

A Great Idea Lives Forever. Shouldn’t Its Copyright? – New York Times

The question “why is the duration of copyright limited?” is asked somewhat frequently in copyright circles. An editorial in yesterday’s Times argued [note, you may need to be a Times Select subscriber to view]:

Booksellers that publish their own titles benefit not from escaping the author’s copyright, but the previous publisher’s exercise of a grant of rights (limited, authors take note, to 35 years). “Freeing” a literary work into the public domain is less a public benefit than a transfer of wealth from the families of American writers to the executives and stockholders of various businesses who will continue to profit from, for example, “The Garden Party,” while the descendants of Katherine Mansfield will not.
[emphasis added]

While the author has a point that, like many other areas of copyright, profit from public domain works serves to enrich industries which are already financially stable, a crucial point is glossed over: future creative works depend on building on the shoulders of past work. Helperin is right that ideas are rightly beyond the scope of copyright, but in our modern “rip and mix” world the flexibility to use previously copyrighted expression (which has lapsed into the public domain) will likely be demanded by the public.

Or, if cultural arguments aren’t your preference, the copyright has historically been limited because of the potential for abuse by copyright owners. Since copyright in a work is usually transferred from creator to publisher anyway, one might ask Helperin “why favor the original ‘executives and stockholders of [a business]’ over another?” …especially when that subsequent publisher might reinvigorate the original work.

No good case exists for the inequality of real and intellectual property, because no good case can exist for treating with special disfavor the work of the spirit and the mind.

The author shouldn’t forget that intellectual property cannot be owned in any real or metaphysical sense. Copyright holders own a copyright– never an actual creative work.

…and in his typical innovative fashion, Lessig has created a wiki page for an organized rebuttal.