Technorati Tags: Apple, iPod, iTunes, Live TV is Dead, long tail, marksbrothers, video
If you read the list, you’ll see that at least some of these artists are apparently dead (e.g. Lonnie Donegan, died 4th November 2002; Freddie Garrity, died 20th May 2006). I take it the ability of these dead authors to sign a petition asking for their copyright terms to be extended can only mean that even after death, term extension continues to inspire.
I’m not yet sure how. But I guess I should be a good sport about it, and just confess I was wrong. For if artists can sign petitions after they’ve died, then why can’t they produce new recordings fifty year ago?
Meanwhile, the Open Rights Group is running a Release The Music campaign, with a petition you can sign. There's also one asking for the right to privately copy CDs to iPods.
Are my readers as good at signing petitions as dead musicians?
Technorati Tags: copyright, law, music, Open Rights Group, ORG
The Gowers Review of Intellectual property released a final report today. The Open Rights Group has a good response on the overall impact, but I noticed some rhetorical bias. Paragraph 1.9 of the report says:
1.9 Achieving this balance is made more difficult by the vocabulary used to discuss IP policy and practice. Copyright infringement through unauthorised copying and distribution of music and video across the Internet is likened to stealing by some, and to sharing by others. Those who seek to prevent others from using a patented invention without permission are branded ‘trolls’*. Those who copy and distribute material illegally are called ‘pirates’. And the problem of ‘orphan’ works, which arises where copyright owners are untraceable, perhaps provokes an easy sympathy.
Having made this point though, the rest of the review uses 'piracy' throughout in phrases like 'strengthening enforcement of IP rights, whether through clamping down on piracy or trade in counterfeit goods', and does not mention patent trolling at all. Down in the glossary at the end, the report defines:
Piracy: Unauthorised duplication of goods protected by IP law
By using this rhetorical trick, Gowers continually makes an equivalence between commercial counterfeiting of CDs on a large scale with the copying inherent and necessary in any use of digital media. Gowers also makes some bizarre leaps of logic:
1.4 Ideas are expensive to produce but cheap to copy. The fixed costs of producing knowledge are high. Hollywood blockbusters can costs hundreds of millions of dollars to make[...]
How much knowledge does a Hollywood blockbuster contain, compared to, say, the Wikipedia page on intellectual property? The fixed costs there are remarkably low. The costs of production are continually plummeting, thanks to digital technologies, and that enables commons-based peer production, like Wikipedia. Some of Gowers recommendations are good, but it looks like he didn't engage with Benkler's Wealth of Networks thesis on new kinds of knowledge creation.
*Patent trolling is when a patent is used to prevent innovation by blackmailing companies with a patent, often second-hand. I've written on patent trolls before.
Krotoski saw, in the reaction of the new merchant class, that something more than his little laboratory had disappeared from the virtual world:
And so, once again, the real world comes crashing in. Sooner or later, most online communities reach this crisis point because the ideals of the founders are replaced by regulations demanded by the different types of people who interact in them. We shouldn't be surprised; what we do when we interact online is replicate the social practices we are familiar with offline. Inspired by this milestone, I'm going to add a wing to my new lab. And inside will be a shrine to CopyBot, the little hack that transformed Second Life into a real world.
Lay a virtual rose on the shrine for me, Aleks.
Now, I've quoted Macaulay on this before, but his clarity of thought is hard to resist on Milton:
If, Sir, I wished to find a strong and perfect illustration of the effects which I anticipate from long copyright, I should select,—my honourable and learned friend will be surprised,—I should select the case of Milton's granddaughter. As often as this bill has been under discussion, the fate of Milton's granddaughter has been brought forward by the advocates of monopoly. My honourable and learned friend has repeatedly told the story with great eloquence and effect. He has dilated on the sufferings, on the abject poverty, of this ill-fated woman, the last of an illustrious race. He tells us that, in the extremity of her distress, Garrick gave her a benefit, that Johnson wrote a prologue, and that the public contributed some hundreds of pounds. Was it fit, he asks, that she should receive, in this eleemosynary form, a small portion of what was in truth a debt? Why, he asks, instead of obtaining a pittance from charity, did she not live in comfort and luxury on the proceeds of the sale of her ancestor's works? But, Sir, will my honourable and learned friend tell me that this event, which he has so often and so pathetically described, was caused by the shortness of the term of copyright? Why, at that time, the duration of copyright was longer than even he, at present, proposes to make it. The monopoly lasted, not sixty years, but for ever. At the time at which Milton's granddaughter asked charity, Milton's works were the exclusive property of a bookseller. Within a few months of the day on which the benefit was given at Garrick's theatre, the holder of the copyright of Paradise Lost,—I think it was Tonson,—applied to the Court of Chancery for an injunction against a bookseller who had published a cheap edition of the great epic poem, and obtained the injunction. The representation of Comus was, if I remember rightly, in 1750; the injunction in 1752. Here, then, is a perfect illustration of the effect of long copyright. Milton's works are the property of a single publisher. Everybody who wants them must buy them at Tonson's shop, and at Tonson's price. Whoever attempts to undersell Tonson is harassed with legal proceedings. Thousands who would gladly possess a copy of Paradise Lost, must forego that great enjoyment. And what, in the meantime, is the situation of the only person for whom we can suppose that the author, protected at such a cost to the public, was at all interested? She is reduced to utter destitution. Milton's works are under a monopoly. Milton's granddaughter is starving. The reader is pillaged; but the writer's family is not enriched. Society is taxed doubly. It has to give an exorbitant price for the poems; and it has at the same time to give alms to the only surviving descendant of the poet.
we can change society's rules, and we do it by experimenting near the edges
Technorati Tags: copyright
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