Wikileaks Hits The Jackpot With Congressional Research Service

from the transparency-is-the-name-of-the-game dept

A bunch of folks have been submitting the rather impressive fact that Wikileaks now has 6,780 reports from the Congressional Research Service free to download. As the post on Wikileaks notes, CRS reports are technically public domain, but have remained in a quasi-secret state, because CRS only releases them to members of Congress. However, the research reports tend to be considered quite credible, non-partisan, timely and useful. That's often why Congress members don't want them anywhere near the public. However, there have been some members of Congress who recognize what a travesty this is, and have been pushing to make the reports open. You have to wonder if a staffer for one of them is responsible for the "leak."

It's great, then, to see these documents get some well-deserved, and much-needed sunlight. However, the really interesting thing will be what the response is from both Congress and the CRS -- both of whom have mostly fought against any attempts to publicly release the documents. It will also be worth watching whether or not these leaks continue as new CRS research comes out, or if there will be something of a crackdown to try (and inevitably fail) to get this information out there.

Filed Under: congress, congressional research service, public domain, wikileaks
Companies: wikileaks

Why Is It So Difficult To Opt-Out Of Copyright?

from the no-easy-way-to-get-into-the-public-domain dept

Every so often, when someone new shows up on Techdirt, reading a post about our complaints about overly aggressive copyright holders, they'll make a comment along the lines of "well, you wouldn't be saying that if someone took Techdirt's content, copied it and started making money from ads! I'm going to do just that, and I bet you'll be just as angry!" And, every time someone posts this, we end up linking back to the fact that a bunch of folks already do this, and we're perfectly fine with it. Here's the explanation I gave for why it's fine with us a while back:

We have no problem with people taking our content and reposting it. It's funny how many people come here, like yourself, and assume you've found some "gotcha." You haven't. There already are about 10 sites that copy Techdirt, post for post. Some of them give us credit. Some of them don't. We don't go after any of them.

Here's why:

1. None of those sites get any traffic. By themselves, they offer nothing special.

2. If anything, it doesn't take people long to read those sites and figure out that the content is really from Techdirt. Then they just come here to the original source. So, it tends to help drive more traffic to us. That's cool.

3. As soon as the people realize the other sites are simply copying us, it makes those sites look really, really bad. If you want to risk your reputation like that, go ahead, but it's a big risk.

4. A big part of the value of Techdirt is the community here. You can't just replicate that.

5. Another big part of the value of Techdirt is that we, the writers, engage in the comments. You absolutely cannot fake that on your own site.

So, really, what's the purpose of copying our content in the manner you describe, other than maybe driving a little traffic our way?

So, if you really want to, I'd suggest it's pretty dumb, but go ahead.

I should note, by the way, that by ignoring these copycat sites, most go away. There's one (relatively nicely designed one) that's managed to stick around for a while, but most fade away pretty quickly. Still, we're perfectly fine with people taking and repurposing our content. We hope they give us attribution, but we don't worry too much if they don't (actually, it would be even cooler if sites added more value to our content). There's really no reason to spend much time thinking about it. Yet, we still get people emailing us all the time to ask for "permission" to reuse our content -- and of course, we always "grant" the permission, even though they don't need it at all.

Sometimes people ask us why we don't put Techdirt under a Creative Commons license. The answer is that while CC-licenses are certainly a good overall concept and I think it's great when people use a CC license, they still rely on copyright to function, and we believe that content creators should experiment with getting by entirely without copyright to see what happens -- and we try to live up to what we promote. Of course, it's actually a lot harder to do that then you might think. As Stephen Kinsella recently discovered putting your content into the public domain is incredibly difficult. In some cases, it's not even possible. Thanks to (relatively recent) copyright law that grants a copyright the instant content is put into a fixed medium. And, while you can put a "public domain declaration" on content, it won't apply in many countries. Effectively it's nearly impossible to legally make your content public domain. So, as for us, we just leave things alone, and figure that most people will figure out sooner or later that they're free to help promote our content by reusing it however they want.

Filed Under: copyright, public domain

UK Copyright Expiration On Popeye May Be A Test For Mickey Mouse

from the i-yam-what-i-yam dept

A bunch of folks have submitted the news that the cartoon character of Popeye is about to go into the public domain in the UK, and it should be quite interesting to see what happens next, as it will be something of a preview of the eventual Mickey Mouse fight that will be coming. To be honest, I'm surprised that were didn't hear attempts to extend basic copyright protection in the UK to prevent this from happening in the first place, as has happened in the past every time Mickey Mouse is about to fall into the public domain. I guess Disney just has more lobbying clout.

However, what will be most interesting is to see what happens next. Disney was able to continually extend copyright to keep Mickey Mouse out of the public domain for years -- in part because copyright wasn't an issue that the general public cared about or that really impacted them in a noticeable way. Obviously, over the past decade, that's changed quite a bit. Disney must know that it will have an awfully difficult time extending copyright yet again (though, the company will almost certainly try). In the meantime, though, what happens with Popeye in the UK may be a rough guide as to what will happen should Mickey Mouse hit the public domain.

And... the reality is that not very much different might happen.

That's because even though the copyright on the character has fallen into the public domain, the trademark remains -- and the current holder of the Popeye trademark in the UK, King Features (owned by Hearst), is expected to "protect its brand aggressively." That means people will still be quite limited in how they can use Popeye. If King Features is able to successfully use trademark law to keep Popeye under control, perhaps Disney won't go quite so crazy trying to extend the copyright on Mickey Mouse again... Either way, this little "experiment" will be worth watching.

Filed Under: copyright, mickey mouse, popeye, public domain
Companies: disney, hearst corporation, king features

Is Putting Change.gov Under Creative Commons Really A Big Deal?

from the help-me,-I'm-missing-something... dept

There's been plenty of attention paid to the news that the website for President-Elect Obama's transition team, Change.gov has been placed under a Creative Commons license, allowing others to make use of the content with attribution. However, I'm a bit hard pressed to see how this actually is a big deal. The whole thing is made a bit odd by the fact that federal government content is not covered by copyright, so anything that comes out of the White House is in the public domain. But, apparently since Obama has not yet been inaugurated, the campaign can still claim copyright on the content. But, why would they? Rather than going with a CC license, why not go all the way and put the content in the public domain? After all, in two months, all such content will be in the public domain anyway? It seems a little odd, counterproductive and unnecessary to add more restrictions to the content than there will be once Obama is actually in office. If the Obama team really wanted to do something meaningful concerning the content on the site, they could follow the advice of Tim O'Reilly and go beyond just putting the content in the public domain and also add revision control, thereby committing to alerting people to any changes to the content. Now, that would be an impressive change.

Filed Under: change.gov, copyright, creative commons, obama, public domain

How Do You Infringe The Copyright Of Public Domain Works?

from the strange-legal-rulings dept

And here's another fun copyright mystery from William Patry: it turns out that some courts have constructed a rather convoluted rationale for how you can still be found to be infringing copyrights, even on material that everyone admits is public domain. While it's rare, he cites two such cases, suggesting that both have rather tortured logic behind them. The first involves a play which was later turned into a movie. While the play remained under copyright, the separate copyright of the movie was not renewed in a timely manner, allowing it to fall into the public domain. Yet, because of the remaining copyright on the play, a court determined that the movie could not be distributed, since it retained some elements directly from the play.

Even if you can sort of understand the reasoning for that one, it's hard to figure out the reasoning behind the second case. In this one, a bunch of episodes from "The Andy Griffith" show fell into the public domain. However, it was just a bunch of episodes from later seasons. Earlier seasons remained under copyright. The court ruled that since the later shows were based on the earlier shows that were still covered by copyright, the later shows could not be distributed freely. This seems like a rather perverse interpretation of copyright law.

But, of course, when you have people viewing copyrights not as an incentive to create, but as a kind of "property" over which you have total control, these types of rulings are bound to occur. The default is quite often going to be to lean towards more control, even if the sensible decision both under the law and for society is to allow the content to really become a part of the public domain.

Filed Under: copyright, infringement, public domain

Is It Illegal To Announce A Patent On Something After That Patent Has Expired?

from the we'll-soon-find-out dept

I'm sure many of you have noticed on various products a notice claiming that the object was covered by some patents, or that it had "patents pending." There are legal reasons for including such notices -- and it's illegal to falsely make such claims. So what happens when the patent expires and the maker of the goods still includes the notice? We're about to find out, as a patent attorney has sued some companies who continue to list expired patents on their products, claiming that this is illegal false marking of patent rights. While there may be practical reasons (the marking process was already in place) for continuing to announce the patent, it's troublesome because it's claiming monopoly rights that the holder does not have and may scare off others from making use of a public domain concept. In this age where so many patent holders view patents as important property, it's no surprise that they have trouble letting go once the patent expires and the concept is moved into the public domain.

Filed Under: expired, patents, public domain

Government-Funded Textbooks: Let's Not And Say We Did

from the bad-ideas dept

One of the retorts I sometimes hear when I criticize our current system of overly broad copyright protection is that the only alternative is government funding of copyrighted works. This is not, of course, what most of us are advocating, and there's every reason to think that a properly balanced and limited system of copyright protection (along with some clever business models) can create plenty of incentives to produce creative works without asking the taxpayer to pay for them. However, every once in a while you come across someone who really does want the government to fund creative works. Dean Baker, for example. is pushing his plan to have the government pay for college textbooks that would then be placed in the public domain for public consumption.

This is a bad idea for a bunch of reasons. For starters, there's no reason to think that government-funded textbooks would be any good. Financing textbooks by selling them to students ensures that textbook publishers have an incentive to produce books that meet the needs of students, or at least their professors, and to improve textbook quality over time. In contrast, if textbooks are financed by taxpayers, the textbooks that get produced are likely to be determined more by politics and bureaucracy than by the needs of the customers. The result is likely to be a lot of mediocre textbooks focused on topics that federal officials think are needed, rather than what will actually get used. Second, there's a basic issue of equity here. College students tend to come from families that are wealthier, on average, than the general public. Less than half of young people attend four-year colleges. So it seems a little perverse to tax everybody in order to subsidize the textbook purchases of relatively privileged college students. Means-tested financial aid programs are much better at reaching students who really need the help. Finally, it's worth asking whether we want to take the risk of politicizing the content of college curricula. We already have enough politics involved in deciding what goes into textbooks used in public high schools, which are publicly-funded. Do we really want the federal government put in charge of deciding what kind of textbooks the country's college students need?

What's really needed, I think, is to find ways to leverage the web for lower-cost distribution of instructional materials. There's no reason to think that college students 20 years from now will still be getting course information from giant paper books. Whether textbooks are replaced by Wikipedia-style collaborative textbook projects, by companies selling site licenses to websites full of instructional materials, by ad-supported instructional websites, or by some business model nobody's thought of yet, there's every reason to think competition from the web will revolutionize the textbook market in the coming years and give both instructors and students more choices about how information is disseminated. We ought to let that process play itself out, and not get the government involved in deciding what should be in our textbooks.

Filed Under: copyright, dean baker, government funded, public domain, textbooks

The Problem With A Database Of Prior Art Is You Don't Know What's Worth Putting In

from the not-so-easy dept

Dan Berninger, who I almost always agree with, has tossed out a suggestion for how tech companies can deal with situations like the one where Verizon was able to squeeze millions of dollars out of Vonage using patents that clearly never should have been granted, as there was tremendous amounts of prior art on the patents (much of which was brought to light by Berninger himself). His suggestion is that tech companies should create "a formal process of contributing software innovations to the public domain." It's one of those ideas that sounds good in theory, but won't work in practice. In the past, we've explained why similar ideas (such as a database of "obvious ideas" for the sake of prior art) will never work.

The main reason: if you're not in the business of generating patents, you generally don't think all of the little things you do are worth patenting or dropping into a database. They just seem obvious and natural, so you don't even bother. It's only in retrospect -- when someone else has patented the concept -- that people start to realize that they wish they had some sort of record of the obvious ideas they had or things they did years before the patent was filed. Sure, people will submit some ideas here or there, but it simply won't seem worth it to many people, especially on very minor things, or very broad things like setting up a hands-free kit in a car. That seems so obvious, why would you even think to patent it... or put it in a database of prior art? So, while it's a nice idea in theory, it will fail in retrospect, because the ideas and concepts that need to be in a database will seem so obvious that people won't bother entering them until it's too late and someone else already has the patent.

Filed Under: database, patents, prior art, public domain

Content Industry Could Learn From eBay Seller Turning A Profit With Public Domain Content

from the competing-with-free dept

Last year, Mike made the point that saying you can't compete with free is saying you can't compete, period. Every business makes a profit by adding value so that customers will be willing to pay above marginal cost for its products. The fact that the marginal cost of content (once it's been created) is zero doesn't change that principle. You can add value to free content just like you can add value to any other product. The New York Times Bits blog nicely illustrates this with a post about the market for public domain content on eBay. Apparently, there are a number of people who make a living by finding obscure, copyright-free content on the Internet, burning it on a DVD or other convenient format, and selling it on eBay. Despite the fact that every one of those customers could have tracked down the video for themselves and watched it on their computers, a lot of people are apparently willing to pay for a DVD version.

This business model actually illustrates two good ways to add value to free content. First is convenience. A lot of people don't have a high-speed Internet connection, don't like watching videos on their computer monitors, or want to be able to take their content with them in a compact format. For those users, a DVD is a much nicer format than a file on their computer's hard drive. DVDs are also a much more convenient format for giving gifts: you can wrap a DVD and put it under the Christmas tree, something that's harder to do with a video on YouTube. Second is filtering and organization. There's way more content out there than any one person could possibly watch. So there's a lot of value in helping people separate the wheat from the chaff. That's a big part of the value we provide here at Techdirt: a lot of the information you'll find on our blog comes from other sites, but we try to highlight only the best and most relevant information, helping our readers to keep up with news in the technology world more easily. By the same token, people who sell public domain content on the Internet create value by filtering and organizing the information so it's easier for others to quickly and easily find what they're looking for.

I won't belabor the implications for traditional content industries. Like it or not, their content is available for free on peer-to-peer sites, and if they want to make a profit they're going to have to find ways to make their content more valuable than what you can get with BitTorrent. Two important principles for doing that are: use formats that convenient and versatile and make sure content is organized in a way that makes it easy for users to find what they're looking for. That means, for example, that you probably shouldn't cripple your products with DRM or sue companies that help people find your content.

Filed Under: adding value, competing with free, ebay, public domain

Canadian Public Domain Not Good Enough For German Publisher

from the this-is-not-the-public-domain-you-were-looking-for dept

It's no secret that different countries have different lengths for copyright. That's why there are constant debates over copyright extension, as countries with shorter terms for copyright are pressured by those with longer terms to extend (or, better yet, to leapfrog) copyright terms. Otherwise, you end up with the situation where content in one country is in the public domain, while it's still under copyright elsewhere. In the age of the internet, where borders are somewhat meaningless online, that's going to cause some problems. Witness the situation with the International Music Score Library Project, a wiki-based project in Canada, for publishing public domain music scores online. The site was careful about copyright, making sure that the only content published was in the public domain. Since the site is based in Canada, it focused on Canadian copyright law and what was in the public domain in that country. Apparently, that was seen as problematic to a German publisher, Universal Edition AG, who found that some of the musical scores that are in the public domain in Canada are still under copyright in Germany. Universal Edition then hired a Toronto law firm to send a cease and desist letter, that caused the entire site to be taken down. Yes, even though all of the content was perfectly legal under Canadian law, this German publisher was able to get it taken offline because some of the content was still under copyright in Europe. If this type of thing is allowed to stand, then we reach a point where all copyright online automatically is covered by the absolute most draconian and stringent levels of copyright law, no matter what the law is anywhere else. That doesn't seem either reasonable or fair.

Filed Under: canada, copyright, copyright extension, eu, international music score library project, public domain
Companies: universal edition ag