This weekend is the 300th anniversary of the Statute of Anne, the first copyright law. As a wag on Twitter noted, we can’t sing it happy birthday because copyright law today prevents us. The essays on the site linked above are from a diverse set of authors, and make interesting reading. Behind almost all of them is the premise that copyright doesn’t work any more. I agree with this.
Copyright was never meant to apply to things you and I do; it was a law made in the context of the end of general censorship and the rise of the printing press. It was intended to protect the weak from the powerful and the powerful from each other. It never applied to people who read printed works, only to those who printed them.
We’ve seen the immense harm that’s resulted from the semantic sleight-of-hand that justifies the violation of our rights because the phrases “war on drugs” and “war on terror” includes the word “war”. A similar, more cunning sleight-of-mind observes that every enjoyment of a work in the digital age requires a “copy”. That means copyright law applies, and thus a license is required by the consumer to waive the monopoly which copyright grants. The freedoms around created works that the Statute of Anne was actually supposed to protect have thus become an excuse to require licenses for every form of modern enjoyment, imposed upon the very citizens who should expect to have their freedoms protected.
The contract expressed by the Statute of Anne (and then made concrete in its echo in the US Constitution) was supposed to be between the powerful producers and society; instead it has become an excuse for the imposition of abusive licenses by the middle-men on the individual – and without fair compensation to the vast majority of authors and other creators. Too many people believe copyright is about the way works are enjoyed, and that belief has led to a self-perpetuating spiral into the abyss of control. Radical reform is overdue.
Radical means “from the roots upwards”. My repeated call is for copyright to be re-interpreted for the connected era. Like Lessig, I think eliminating copyright is too extreme. The social contract upon which it is based – the exchange of temporary monopoly among distributors for protection of both the creator and ultimate enjoyer of the work – remains valid. But it needs casting in an age where every citizen is a peer, rather than in an age of controlling hubs and passive spokes.
In the UK, the election is upon us, and the outrage of the Digital Economy Act is fresh in our minds. Let’s get this reform rolling.
“Why, absent any evidence of a serious terror threat, is a war to on terror so enormous, so all-encompassing, and still expanding? The fundamental answer is that al Qaeda’s most important accomplishment was not to hijack our planes but to hijack our political system.”
Finally, an article that’s able to look at the real issue with IBM & its patent pledge. Sensible and balanced piece from DJ Walker-Morgan, just as I’ve come to expect from him.
While this is fantastic and much-needed news, it will take a Supreme Court decision to truly address the abuse of patent and copyright laws to prevent innovative uses of DNA information.
A list showing which MPs voted for the Digital Economy Bill. These people prefer corporations over citizens and probably don’t deserve your vote in the election.
I’ve had some useful communications from a variety of well-informed people after yesterday’s blog about IBM and TurboHercules, and two things are clear from what I’ve heard:
The case IBM has against TurboHercules has many murky layers and it’s pretty pointless trying to decide from the outside who is right. Certainly the sources we’ve heard so far are insufficient and have unclear motivations, especially knowing that Microsoft’s puppy CCIA is involved. I am not in any way interested in calling either IBM or TurboHercules evil on the evidence so far. To be clear: I have no view on the merits of the actual issue between IBM and TurboHercules.
IBM’s actions in the case lack the necessary internal oversight for some reason. IBM messed up in allowing a document to leave the building suggesting any of the patents they had pledged to protect open source software would be used against it, and they need to admit the error and apologise. We all make mistakes, and when we make them most of us are called to account. I see no reason why IBM should be exempt. Continue reading →
What is the significance of IBM’s patent attack on the company behind the open source Hercules community? I believe it may indicate a change in the balance of power inside IBM, one probably reflected in other large corporations, as cloud computing rises in prominence and as the main disruptive force becomes Google – a large user of FOSS – instead of Microsoft. We need to take note. Oh, and I’m using “reptile” in a technical sense 🙂 Continue reading →
Pretty good analysis of the IBM patent aggression from ESR: “IBM has reached a critical juncture. For the last decade the company has has had it both ways – allied with the open-source community to grow its forward-looking services business, and creamed big profits off the long-since-paid-for z-Series technology. Now these two strategies are in conflict. Whichever way this ends, IBM will probably only get to keep one of them.”
If the British music industry is so urgently in need of protection by the Digital Economy Bill, how come they had their best year ever for sales in 2009 including exceptional sales of digital media? Is it possible they have been selective with the evidence they have been feeding Stephen Timms and Sion Simon of the British Labour Party?
So much for IBM’s support for open source. When it’s a potential threat rather than a stick to beat their competitors, their situational ethics leads to this sort of attack. Clearly their membership of OIN and their “patent pledge” mean little in practice.
Kevin Marks with a great (and short) comment that highlights the real, long-term issue with where copyright, trademark and especially patent law is headed. All three were originally intended to prevent abuse by originators of products. All three have become instruments to control consumers of products in the digital realm.
Until now, those of us with first-hand contact with the emerging digital economy have gone largely unheard as the giants of 20th century industry have used the influence granted to them in the years since they were the underdog to manipulate legislation into shoring up their businesses. Today, legislation acts against citizens rather than protecting them. It’s time to reverse the trend and be heard. I called my MP about the Bill, and I am not alone.
This election in the UK, we need to put the real digital economy – the one with citizens in it – on the agenda.
“As copyright laws get more ridiculous, we’re teaching people to not move forward if they don’t know for sure — and that can create a massive stifling of creativity and expression.” — This is the reason we need to turn back the trend expressed by the Digital Economy Bill. As Kevin Marks suggests, it’s creating a digital economy the same way the Locomotive Bill created a transportation system.
Presumably after this the trolls with the patent pursue pretty much everyone else on the internet? It’s hard to imagine a better poster-child for patent reform.
“Quick, define irony: the BBC, one of the main proponents of a bill to allow them to use other people’s images in ways they didn’t envisage without permission or payment, is furious that somebody has taken a BBC image and used it in a way the BBC didn’t envisage without permission or payment.” — Section 43 of the Digital Economy Bill is a travesty of justice for photographers, from amateurs-on-iStockPhoto like me all the way up.
Just in case you were in any way confused (which it seems a whole lot of people are), copying is not stealing, as this charming little jingle illustrates. Infringing someone’s copyright may be against the law, but it is not theft, and whenever you hear someone say that it is you’ve just spotted the “genetic marker” for someone who is either confused or trying to feed you spin. Most likely the latter at the moment.
Tomorrow is the second reading of the Digital Economy Bill in the House of Commons in the UK. It’s important that we all let our representatives know that geeks vote too and that the people with a first-hand understanding of the issues think it needs more scrutiny. I’ve included three great, thoughtful posts from JP Rangaswami of BT which provide explanations that are good for non-specialists.
JP has written here a long article about the potential unintended consequences of the Digital Economy Bill for the music industry. I disagree slightly with his continued focus on the downloads aspect. The biggest problems with the bill are that, in the name of protecting Cliff Richard’s pension, it will remove photographers’ rights, eliminate open wifi, enable easy censorship for unethical corporations and introduce other abuses the way the DMCA did.
His analysis is still very much worth reading to bring home the fact that the Bill dabbles inexpertly in an incredibly complex area of interlocking ecosystems and will upset them just as surely as introducing cane toads did in Australia.
JP with a delicious parable explaining why the Digital Economy Bill, although well-intentioned, acts in a way that’s disproportionate. Personally I am amazed to hear Gordon Brown preaching about the need for every citizen to have internet access and the need for online access to government services, and then in the next breath saying it’s fine to have it taken away for an offence whose analogue equivalents wouldn’t result in suspension of access to government services.
JP illustrates nicely the disconnect between what our politicians think the digital economy is from their (at best) second-hand pedestal and what people actually engaged first-hand in the digital economy think it is.
I have so far seen no mention of the challenges of the surveillance society by any political party in the materials delivered to my home.
While the front benches of the main parties try (hopefully unwittingly) to criminalise kids over copyright, rob photographers of their income, shut down nationwide wifi and provide a way for corporations to censor citizens and competitors, the police are running roughshod over our rights using exactly the same technologies.
The Digital Economy that our politicians have in mind is second-hand, relayed to them via lobbyists. Today is the day to contact your MP and the candidates in the upcoming election and tell them that you, a first-hand participant in the Digital Economy, are not satisfied.
All views expressed on this blog are those of Simon Phipps and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other entity, including current and former employers and clients. See my full disclosure of interests.
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