Online Technology Entrepreneurship Class At Stanford Postponed... Because Of Copyright

from the first-lesson:-fix-copyright dept

The Constitutional clause often referred to as the Copyright Clause involves granting the power to Congress:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

Many people get confused and don't realize that the "Science" part was really about copyright (not the "useful arts.") And, by "science" they really meant "learning." In fact, the very first US Copyright law, in 1790, was entitled:

An ACT for the Encouragement of Learning

So you would think that the use of copyright law to block the encouragement of learning would be unconstitutional. Unfortunately, it happens all the time. Jon sent over the news that the online Technology Entrepreneurship class he'd been looking forward to taking from Stanford University has apparently been postponed due to copyright issues. According to the classes' professor, Chuck Eesley:

Unfortunately, the launch of my Technology Entrepreneurship online course has been placed on hold, due to delays surrounding copyright and intellectual property clearance issues. We are working on this and I anticipate providing you with an update within the next few months.

In an age where there's lots of support and interest in online education, to find out that copyright law, of all things, is being used to block education seems like a complete travesty.

Filed Under: copyright, culture, education, entrepreneurship, learning, stanford university

Why Ebook Portal Library.nu Differed From Other Filesharing Sites

from the paying-the-price dept

A couple of weeks ago the popular ebook portal Library.nu was shut down, apparently voluntarily, after a coalition of book publishers obtained an injunction against it and a similar site. As an excellent post on the kNOw Future Inc. blog points out, Library.nu was significant in a number of ways:

the demand for the works offered there demonstrates that filesharing is not just about pop music, porn and cams of action movies, but also those forms and sources of knowledge whose acquisition are ritually celebrated within 'enlightenment' culture.

The stereotypical downloader -- young, and looking for easy entertainment online -- was in part a function of what was available initially. The Library.nu site showed that fans of "high culture" were just as keen to obtain digital versions of their stuff as those with more "low-brow" tastes.

Many of those whose works were offered derive income not from royalties, but from related activities such as teaching and research. Such people were themselves an important component library.nu’ user base.

The first part means that the authors of those books wrote not for money, principally, but for other reasons -- for example, prestige or influence. It was actually in their interests for their works to be circulated as widely as possible in order to enhance their reputation, and Library.nu made that possible. It's not clear what evidence there is for the second sentence quoted above, but assuming it's true, it would indicate that for some, at least, the Library.nu ethos was "share and share alike".

The post concludes:

Some [of those downloading from Library.nu] have other means to access the same materials, others, especially those in countries with weaker education infrastructures and more emaciated library budgets, do not. Outside of formal education, the millions of online autodidacts may be denied access to material, seriously impinging on their lives and possibilities. When one considers the cost of text books and more especially scholarly articles, that is no hyperbole, and applies not only to the global south but the post-industrial north as well, awash in its dreams of knowledge economies and human capital.

That suggests two things. First, that publishers are missing out on a huge audience that is hungry for knowledge, but simply can't afford text books, say, at current pricing. Once again, piracy is driven partly by a failure to serve the market properly.

The other point is that although publishers may rejoice that Library.nu has been taken down, readers around the world will suffer in terms of losing access to these works that they can't afford. Some may say that's just tough, or that these people should work harder or make greater sacrifices elsewhere in order to be able to afford such books. But in many locations, those books are not available legally at any price.

As a result, when sites like Library.nu disappear, there is a cost to society as a whole because of the knock-on effects of reduced information flow, and of practical knowledge that is unavailable for application as a result. In this respect, sites with large collections of digitized textbooks are quite different from those that are principally offering music or video downloads for entertainment.

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Filed Under: culture, ebooks, file sharing, library

La La La La La: The Internet Routes Around Copyright Censorship To Restore Daria

from the infringement-as-restoration dept

One of the things I've never liked about copyright is its potential to be the functional equivalent of censorship. Sometimes this censorship comes about because an author didn't get permission to create his work in the first place (see: Richard Prince, JD California). While this unfortunately turns judges into cultural gatekeepers, it's been deemed a necessary balance between copyright law and the First Amendment, and harm to the public is arguably lessened by the fact that we don't know what we're missing; because the censored work is never able to reach and impact us, we've only lost the potential of its cultural contribution.

However, other times a work is created with the initial blessing of copyright, makes its mark on the public, then becomes effectively censored down the line due to licensing restrictions (see: The Wonder Years, Werewolf). This is much more culturally pernicious because it deprives the public of a work already in its lexicon, and the sense of loss is far more palpable as a result. Often, the only way to get the work back in the public's hands is to perform triage, excise the no-longer-licensed content, and try to be happy with a bastardized version of the work (see: WKRP in Cincinnati, The State).

What's interesting, however, is how we've seen the Internet step up to effectuate cultural preservation, when copyright law stands in the way. I recently picked up a DVD collection of Daria, one of the last good things MTV ever produced. The show had an immense impact on my childhood, in no small part because of how it helped frame pop culture for me with its liberal use of MTV-placed contemporary music, and I was incredibly excited to relive that experience. When I opened up the DVD case, however, I was greeted with the following message: For those who can't see the note, it says in the pertinent part:

"So let's answer the big question right away: 99 percent of the music has been changed, because the cost of licensing the many music bites we used would have made it impossible to release the collection (and for many years did). So no, these aren't the shows as aired, but more like one of those astronauts in a TWILIGHT ZONE episode who returns from space and his wife can't figure out what's changed about him, until it slowly dawns on her that instead of a cool song from 1997 playing when he walks into the room, it's some tune she's never heard. Yeah, it's just like that."

Needless to say, I was disappointed. As I Googled around for more information, I could see many other fans of the series felt the same, opining that, "when I watch the show without proper music it feels as though one of the main characters is missing," and "even to those who say they didn't pay much attention to the music, I think you'll still sense an absence." Then I stumbled across something else entirely. Something called "The Daria Restoration Project." Essentially, certain Daria fans had taken to combining the high-quality video and spoken audio of the official DVDs with the music that accompanied the original broadcasts, either sourced from old television recordings or by manually inserting the pertinent songs. They're doing their best to preserve the fidelity of a major piece of culture that is currently only legally available to the public in crippled form.

And of course, their curating efforts are 100% illegal, punishable by hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars in fines.

To be sure, copyright owners are supposed to be able to control how their works are used to create new works outside the bounds of ideas and fair use (though we don't always get that right). However, allowing copyright licensing to prevent the public from accessing the proper versions of culturally-significant media, after their creation and initial publication has already been sanctioned, almost smacks of a marketplace parallel to the European "right of withdrawal." It not only presents a huge hurdle to the preservation of certain works, but robs the public of the value they placed in that media while it was available to them.

While the Internet is not nearly as "lawless" as many would like us to believe, there are certainly pockets of it where the traditional rule of law is less readily applied. And though this poses a challenge to society in some aspects, there is also undoubted utility in having these pockets able to function in the interest of the public, the proper beneficiaries of copyright law, when the legal state of play so radically conflicts with that interest. As a law student, I'm not happy when I see pirates doing a better job than copyright owners at preserving and spreading culture; after all, the Supreme Court recently noted in its Golan decision that copyright law can serve its core purpose not only by incentivizing the creation of works, but the dissemination of them as well. Yet here we see copyright hurdles completely inhibiting the proper dissemination of legally-created works through economic censorship.

Well, as John Gilmore once said, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." So until copyright law manages to untangle itself and properly serve its own fundamental purpose, I'm glad we can rely on pirates to do its job for it.

Filed Under: censorship, copyright, culture, daria, music, piracy, restoration

Beware Of Those Who Claim They're 'Saving The Culture Business' When They're Really Protecting Those Who Strip Artists Of Rights

from the 'culture-business'-ain't-culture dept

We've talked a few times about the ridiculously unsupported and unsupportable claim by Robert Levine that the "tech industry" (by which he means "Google") is somehow destroying culture by "free riding" on content. There are so many things wrong with this argument that it would take an entire book to debunk them one by one. But, as we've recently shown, the culture business isn't dying at all -- instead, it's been growing quite nicely over the past decade. So what's going on? Lateef Mtima, from the Institute for Intellectual Property and Social Justice at Howard University does a nice job dismantling Levine's argument by showing that what Levine is arguing isn't about "saving the cultural busness," it's about saving a few giant media conglomerates who used to be the gatekeepers to culture (often at the expense of artists -- especially minority artists), and pretending that without those companies, there wouldn't be much culture. As Mtima notes, this is, ultimately, an incredibly elitist position:

Culture is not something reserved to an elite. No particular business or set of businesses and no particular business model should be protected from the winds of innovation and change in the name of preserving culture. A people’s culture is just that -- the people’s culture....

And this is really a key point. The few companies that Levine is looking to save are not the deciders and arbiters of culture, no matter how much Levine wants them to be. In fact, they're often the companies who are really cheapening culture themselves and stripping the rights from the artists themselves, signing them to ridiculously one-sided contracts that are almost criminal in how they strip artists of their own rights and toss them out on the street for the profit of a few business fat cats.

Initially Levine presents his book on the pending doom of American culture as an appeal really done on behalf of the financial interests of artists, writers, and musicians. (One might be forgiven for skepticism and for asking where was/is Levine on the issue of IP corporate establishment exploitation of African American and other marginalized artists who have been pillaged by those entities for more than a century.)

Of course “protecting struggling artists” is only the cover story. Levine actually knows what many other Americans realize–that most artists are trapped in contractual peonage with their corporate distributers and that they often retain no property interests capable of being ravaged by third-party pirates.

It really is quite a disgusting, paternalistic, almost antebellum argument: that these poor artists need some big conglomerate to come "rescue them," take control of their rights, in order to produce "the culture business." The reality is quite different of course. What's happening every day out here, in the real world, is that new companies -- often from the "tech industry" that Levine insists is killing off his heroes at the major labels and studios -- are providing the tools for amazing new cultural works to be produced, distributed, promoted, shared and monetized. Witness the great success of companies like Kickstarter, and the fact that they're doing it without typical Hollywood smarminess.

But the real cultural elitism from Levine shows through in his disdain for the kinds of amazing culture produced all the time outside of the circles of the gatekeepers.

Levine utterly ignores creative and impactful and socially desirable user-generated material such as the insertion into a picture of Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” a still from the video of a policeman nonchalantly pepper spraying demonstrators engaging in the Occupy movement. Such works make statements and connect people culturally in ways Levine apparently does not value and would stop....

.... The constitutional grant of power to Congress to regulate copyrights and patents explicitly states that the purpose of such laws is to benefit the public. Innovation is to insure progress for everyone, not merely wealth for a few. The Internet may indeed be destroying the culture business, or at least some of it in its entrenched form, but it is not destroying culture. Intellectual property law is not designed to be, never has been intended to be, and must not be allowed to become the footservant of moneyed erstwhile overlords.

Levine's argument, in the end, comes down to a somewhat sickening assertion that without the Universal Musics of the world, artists wouldn't be able to produce their cultural works. It's that poor artists need big corporations to mold and shape their cultural creations, or such culture won't exist. To both the public and many artists, that argument isn't just laughable, it's insulting.

Filed Under: amateurs, culture, elites, free ride

The Rise Of The 'Professional Amateur' And The Fall Of Gated, Exclusionary 'Clubs'

from the the-internet-is-the-ultimate-siege-engine dept

As the gatekeepers continue to see their carefully constructed walls crumbling, they have rushed to shore up the walls using any means at their disposal, whether it's legislation, lawsuits or simple exclusion. But those within the gates aren't much happier, despite the limitations imposed by the gatekeepers, and many are just as resistant to change as the legacy industries they work in.

Tadhg Kelly at GamesBrief has delivered an excellent post explaining why it's so hard for the creators still working within the confines of these industries to embrace the future:

Creative industries tend to be like clubs. You can get into the club in many ways, but all of them are equally difficult. You've put the time in, done the training, had the lucky breaks, struggled and finally made it. Once you are actually in the club then life is easier. You have a name, you are a part of a network and you work with a lot of the same people year in year out. Members rarely fall out of the club entirely...

We are pros. We are "in". And we are aware that there are so many more people who are not "in" that would like to be.

Perhaps they have an overly-romantic notion of what it's like but that's just how it is. All creative fields, from modern art through to advertising have that lustre because people like the idea of making things for a living.

That last sentence is key. Even as the limitations and drawbacks of yoking your creative output to a major label or a large publishing house become more apparent, the lure remains nearly as strong, simply because for a long period of time, these legacy industries were the best option. But now they're not, and this threatens those still working within the system.

[P]art of being "in" is the sense that the club can't get too big, and for many the internet is actually pushing to make the club smaller. Book publishers, for example, no longer offer much in the way of advances. Long-tail services like Netflix and Spotify have such huge libraries that every new artist is competing not just with their peers, but their antecedents also. Distribution may rise but prices fall.

They feel squeezed by piracy. Though they dislike it, many who are "in" quietly believe that they have to keep many more people "out" in order to hold on to what remains. I don't mean executives etc. I mean established writers, musicians, game makers and so on. We live in a curious age where the freest of thinkers (artists of various stripes) are the ones that want to curtail freedom the most.

The pressure to control the internet isn't simply studio execs and big content lobbyists. The pressure is also exerted by those on the inside, who aren't happy to see huge shifts in the gameplan or new blood being introduced. But even worse, they can't tell whether the gates are protecting them or trapping them.

Those who are "in" also feel squeezed by something else: Democratisation of tools. It's bad enough that they have to deal with a loss of revenue, but a reduction of difficulty in getting into the club threatens to increase its size many times over. The future is a world awash with low-rent ebooks, GarageBand music and GameMaker-developed games. Quality will collapse, and there will be no future for the professional any more.

This opinion is expressed quite often during discussions about legacy industries, that if the barriers are low enough, everyone's going to jump the fence and water down the creative field. To those in the club, it looks hopeless: set adrift in a sea of low-talent amateurs whose willingness to undercut the competition with massive amounts of cheap/free goods.

But they fail to see the upside to the removal of barriers:

In the startup world, the reduction of barriers is a great boon. You can, for example, assemble a small team and go create a tool that will change the world. As an individual you can create a blog that causes conversations and change. You can develop a game, make music, start a design agency, and all you need is a laptop.

With the barriers to entry removed, the stage is set for a new breed of creators: the professional amateur.

It's not amateur in the sense of a lack of diligence, nor is it professional in the sense of those who are "in". The forces of technology distribution and cheap or free tools creates a space for talent to do what talent wants to do. It creates a class of pro-amateur makers.

A pro-amateur perhaps works on a project as a side-line to her day-job but she treats it seriously. Like any struggling writer, there is the work and the need to pay the rent. The difference is that the pro-amateur then takes her work and distributes it directly. She creates a book, an album, a TV series and just puts it out there. It only really costs her time to do it, and if it works it works. If not, she does something else.

As has always been the case, making money in the creative world is hard. Most people cannot afford to do it as their only source of income. This isn't a new problem, although many of those on the inside of the "club" tend to portray it as such. But this new hybrid form of creator will be able to do things they can't, thanks to platforms and tools they embrace, rather than distrust.

The magic of the internet is therefore this: It substitutes time spent getting into the club with time spent finding fans. Expertise with experience. Legitimacy with audience. Jargon with generosity. And for those with the talent to do it well come the rewards because niche audiences that blossom into tribes exist for almost anything you can think of.

To coin a phrase (ha!), Connect with Fans and give them a Reason to Buy.

Filed Under: amateurs, clubs, culture, gatekeepers, professionals

We're Living In the Most Creative Time In History

from the a-true-renaissance dept

As we recently noted in our The Sky Is Rising study, all of the evidence shows that we're living in a time of true abundance in terms of the content world. All of the data shows this. It's really incontrovertible. And yet, we keep hearing from certain folks -- often legacy entertainment industry interests -- that somehow the content creation world is at risk. That's pretty difficult to square with reality. In fact, I think it could be argued that if the industry gets its way with some of its legal proposals that would put this amazing age of creativity at much greater risk than anything the industry is complaining about.

It seems that plenty of others are recognizing this as well. Tom sent over a great blog post by Terry Border of Bent Objects, explaining why this is the most creative time in history... and why we shouldn't take that for granted. And, of course, a big reason for such an explosion of creativity is because of the internet, and the ability to not just create, promote and distribute works, but the ability to communicate.

Think about the art of writing for a minute. Think about creative, or biographical, or whatever kind of writing. Before blogging, how many people wrote any more than it took to fill the space of postcard? If it wasn't their profession, I'd say very few. Now, it seems like everyone has had a blog at one time or another. And now "micro-blogging" is in style thanks to Twitter. Not as many words you say? Right, but it's a different skill that people are learning. Very concise wording. Do people want to post boring tweets? Of course not. People spend quite a few minutes of their day trying to write interesting, humorous, or informative Tweets and Facebook updates. Small bits of creativity for sure, but add them up on a weekly basis, and it's quite a bit.

I think of all the craftspersons who have learned from each other on-line. Popular knitting blogs for instance have taken that old past-time of grandma's and made it mainstream. Before Etsy and the like, where would a person sell the scarves and hats that they made besides the occasional craft fair? I mean, a family only needs so many scarves, and then the knitting needles were put away. Communities on the web not only serve as a place to share work and ideas, but that also serve as shops to sell your product worldwide, creating a reason to make more, and to try new, crazy ideas. Kind of incredible.

That's just a small clip from his longer post, which goes into much more detail. It's worth a read, and definitely pay attention to his conclusion:

My contention is that these days we live in right now will be looked back on with longing, especially with various governments trying to push through laws to control the internet. If that happens, these will be the good old days, so don't take them for granted. Look around and enjoy. I think this is an incredible time to make things, and I hope it stays around for a while.

Couldn't have said it better myself. And this is part of the reason why so many people are so worried about things like SOPA, PIPA, ACTA and TPP. We don't want this amazing era to go away. We just want it to get better and better.

Filed Under: communications, copyright, creativity, culture, internet, pipa, sopa, terry border

When Judges Are Determining Whether Or Not Art Should Exist... We Have A Problem

from the judges-as-art-critics dept

We've written about the somewhat horrifying ruling in the Richard Prince appropriation art case before. If you haven't been following the details, Prince is an appropriation artist, who takes works he finds elsewhere, and modifies and transforms them into different pieces of artwork. The law around this kind of artwork is tragically murky -- with some cases ruling that appropriation art is fair use, and some ruling otherwise. The Prince case got extra attention for a few reasons. One is that Prince is considered one of the biggest name artists around, and his works can sell for millions of dollars. The second is that this case also implicated the gallery that showed Prince's work, raising some serious questions about secondary liability for galleries, and whether or not galleries themselves must become copyright experts. Finally, the ruling suggested that Prince's artwork -- valued at a few million dollars -- might need to be destroyed..

This is the truly horrifying part. Whether or not you appreciate the work, clearly some people do like it. Personally, it's not my taste, but I'll be damned if my own personal taste (or any other third party's personal taste) should ever be the determining factor in whether or not any particular piece of art should exist.

And, yet, that's what we have here. While the case is on appeal, the NY Times recently ran a pretty good overview of the case, and highlighted why the art world is paying so much attention to it. Especially for a younger generation, building new works of art on works that came before seems totally natural. It's a good thing:

“For the generation that I spend my days with, there’s not even any ideological baggage that comes along with appropriation anymore,” said Stephen Frailey, an artist whose work has used appropriation and who runs the undergraduate photography program at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. “They feel that once an image goes into a shared digital space, it’s just there for them to change, to elaborate on, to add to, to improve, to do whatever they want with it. They don’t see this as a subversive act. They see the Internet as a collaborative community and everything on it as raw material.”

At the same time the tools for mining and remolding those mountains of raw material are proliferating. In November a developer and a designer introduced an iPad art app called Mixel, aimed at amateurs but certain to end up in artists’ studios. It allows users to grab images from the Web or elsewhere, collage them almost effortlessly and then pass them around, social media style, for appreciation or re-mixing.

One of its creators, Khoi Vinh, a former design director of NYTimes.com, has been surprisingly frank when asked about the tsunami of copyright problems such an idea stirs up. “This is really a case of, you have to do it, try it and ask for forgiveness later,” he said to an interviewer. “Otherwise it would never get out there.”

What you begin to realize is that, like the wider copyright battle, to some extent this is a "generational" thing. And I don't mean that totally as an "age" thing. There are plenty of "older" people who understand these issues (or who create works via appropriation), just as there are some younger copyright maximalists. But, in general, this does seem like a generational thing, where you have generations of people who simply find the process of building on the works of art completely natural, and those who don't.

But the part that really troubles me about these discussions is a rather simple point about fair use: if the new work does not, in any way, harm the original work, it's seems positively insane to me to think that it shouldn't be seen as fair use. This point is made by Prince's lawyers:

Joshua Schiller, Mr. Prince’s appeals lawyer from the firm Boies, Schiller & Flexner, said the boundary is whether a new work of art results from the borrowing. And he argued that it was clear that Mr. Prince had made parts of Mr. Cariou’s pictures into distinctive Richard Prince works, not just copy them to pass them off as his own and deprive Mr. Cariou of his livelihood. Whether the work was successful and whether Mr. Prince’s intentions were interesting or even explainable can be left to debate. But the primary intention was to create a work of art, Mr. Schiller said, and that is the kind of creativity the law seeks to encourage.

“This is not piracy,” he said. “These are not handbags.”

I'm still waiting for someone (anyone!) to give me a compelling explanation for why it's a problem in any way, shape or form, if the new work does nothing to take away from the old work. In fact, in cases like this, it's easy to argue that the new work, since it came from a much more well known and successful artist, likely drew much more attention to the original work, thereby raising that artist's profile and stature.

Filed Under: appropriation art, art, copyright, culture, fair use, intent, patrick cariou, richard prince

Why Piracy Is Indispensable For The Survival Of Our Culture

from the posterity-will-thank-them dept

Last Year Techdirt wrote about the case of the huge collection of historic jazz recordings that had been acquired by the US National Jazz Museum. The central problem is that even if the recordings can be digitized before they deteriorate, very few people will hear them because of their complicated copyright status.

But as this eye-opening article from Benj Edwards explains, bad as that situation is, it's even worse for the entire category of software creations. For example, consider the earlier generation of floppy-based programs:

Floppy disks, which were once used as the medium du jour for personal computers, have a decidedly finite lifespan: estimates for the data retention abilities of a floppy range anywhere from one year to 30 years under optimal conditions.

A floppy stores data in the form of magnetic charges on a specially treated plastic disc. Over time, the charges representing data weaken to the point that floppy drives can’t read them anymore. At that point, the contents of the disk are effectively lost.

This becomes particularly troubling when we consider that publishers began releasing software on floppy disk over 30 years ago. Most of those disks are now unreadable, and the software stored on them has become garbled beyond repair. If you’ve been meaning to back up those old floppies in your attic, I have bad news: it’s probably too late.

Actually, the situation is even worse than that, because software publishers in the 1980s spent a huge amount of effort trying to make it impossible to copy their programs, through the use of things like hardware dongles that had to be plugged into the computer, or intentionally-corrupt sectors on the discs. That makes the creation of backups a non-trivial matter.

Fortunately, getting around such schemes is just the kind of challenge that hackers enjoy, and this has led to efforts by enthusiasts to preserve these fast-disappearing cultural artefacts by transferring them from the old media to more modern storage. As Edwards explains:

For the past decade, collectors and archivists have been compiling vast collections of out-of-print software for vintage machines (think Apple II, Commodore 64, and the like) and trading them through file sharing services and on "abandonware" websites. Through this process, they’ve created an underground software library that, despite its relative newness, feels like the lost archives of an ancient digital civilization.

That's great, apart from one slight problem: under today's copyright laws, all these wonderful backups that will probably ensure the programs' survival while civilization itself is still around, are illegal. The choice is stark: follow copyright law, and watch decades of computer culture literally fade away on their unreadable floppies, or save them for posterity - and break the law.

Nor is this is a problem that only concerns antediluvian forms of computing. Our cool, smartphone- and tablet-based approach is no better:

take a look at the iTunes App Store, a 500,000 app repository of digital culture. It’s controlled by a single company, and when it closes some day (or it stops supporting older apps, like Apple already did with the classic iPod), legal access to those apps will vanish. Purchased apps locked on iDevices will meet their doom when those gadgets stop working, as they are prone to do. Even before then, older apps will fade away as developers decline to pay the $100 a year required to keep their wares listed in the store.

This is a deep and fundamental problem with not just computing culture, but all artistic expression that is locked down with DRM. The only way that its glories will be preserved for future generations is if considerate "pirates" make illegal back-up copies, stripped of copy protection. For DRM is a guarantee of oblivion: the term of copyright is so disproportionately long, few will care about breaking ancient DRM to make backups of long-forgotten digital creations when it eventually becomes legally permissible to do so.

Edwards concludes with a call to action:

If you see strict DRM and copy protection that threatens the preservation of history, fight it: copy the work, keep it safe, and eventually share it so it never disappears.

Some people may think ill of your archival efforts now, but they’re on the wrong side of history: no one living 500 years from now will judge your infringing deeds harshly when they can load up an ancient program and see it for themselves.

This is a crucial point: whatever qualms people might have about piracy now, posterity will have no doubts whatsoever. It's not simply that the supposed harms of piracy to culture are exaggerated, as more and more evidence suggests: it's that in the long term, piracy is actually indispensable for its preservation.

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Filed Under: archiving, copyright, culture, history, infringement, piracy

Lomax Jukebox Going Digital Is Great News... But Let's Not Forget That He Claimed Copyright On Cultural Works That Weren't His

from the copyfraud dept

The NY Times recently reported on the excellent news that "technology has caught up to the imagination of Alan Lomax." In case you don't know, Lomax was something of a global folk music archivist and "ethnomusicologist." He traveled the world, recording local folk music in huge collections. He did this for decades, and apparently wanted to create a giant jukebox so people could hear everything he recorded. And, now, ten years after he died, the collection -- including more than 5,000 hours of recordings -- is going online. It's kicking off with 17,000 tracks, and much more is still being digitized.

The article talks about how he had a "utopian" vision in making this music available:

“Alan was doubly utopian, in that he was imagining something like the Internet based on the fact he had all this data and a set of parameters he thought of as predictive,” John Szwed, a Columbia University music professor and the author of “Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World,” a biography published in 2010, told The Times. “But he was also saying that the whole world can have all this data too, and it can be done in such a way that you can take it home.”

Now, to be clear, all of this is great, but I do wonder about some of the copyright questions here. Last year, we wrote about the bizarre and convoluted story of how Lomax is credited as a songwriter on a Jay-Z song. Apparently, when he recorded these random folk songs around the globe, he claimed copyrights on the works. This is, of course, questionable. At best, he might have a claim on a copyright to the sound recording only, though even that might be questioned, as his creative input into the recording likely would not be enough to qualify for copyright. The copyright, if any exists, would likely belong to the singers (and possibly whoever wrote the songs, though it's likely that many were simply passed down over time).

And yet, Lomax put a copyright claim on the works, including a recording he did of the traditional work song, "Rosie," recorded by Lomax at Parchman Farm, sung by convicts there. That song became the basis of a song by the Animals -- who didn't use the actual recording. Grand Funk Railroad then covered the song (again, not using the actual recording, but starting from scratch). However, Lomax was still credited as a songwriter, despite having nothing to do with it. KRS-One then sampled a guitar riff (having absolutely nothing to do with the original "Rosie") in a song... which Jay-Z then sampled in his song, "Takeover." Lomax's singular contribution was recording "Rosie," a traditional song which almost certainly was public domain. Even if Lomax could claim a copyright on his recording (still questionable), he had no songwriting credit... yet that's what it morphed into... and then stuck on songs going forward.

Perhaps the copyfraud achieved here created songwriting royalties that are now allowing the financing of this great digital jukebox... but it still makes me wonder just what the copyright setup will be of this jukebox. The folks behind it suggest that they'll be quite permissive, especially for non-profit usage, but it still makes you wonder about whether or not even that level of control is warranted.

Filed Under: alan lomax, copyright, culture, digital jukebox, folklorist, permission, recordings

Responses To Nimblebit Point Out That Inspiration Comes From Lots Of Places

from the indeed-it-does dept

We just wrote about Nimblebit's response to Zynga upon discovering Zynga's game that looks a lot like a Nimblebit game. In that post, we noted that even Nimblebit's game was hardly the first such game out there, and now (as pointed out in our comments), someone decided to take the format of Nimblebit's letter, and redo it as a letter to Nimblebit about the other games that inspired Nimblebit's game. The tone is a little snarky -- and to be honest, I never got the feeling from the original that Nimblebit was claiming that it, too, wasn't inspired by others. Still, this really does show the nature of creativity and copying these days. All of these games can (and do) happily co-exist in the marketplace, where they can compete with each other to improve and provide a better consumer experience. And that seems like a good thing. On top of that, for those who are worried about another company copying them, it helps to remember that then you can copy their best ideas right back.... and improve on them. It's through this sort of process that innovation rates increase...

Filed Under: building, copying, creativity, culture, video games
Companies: nimblebit