Geek On The Mountain

Milenka has a set of CS Lewis’s Narnia Books that are quite old. It looks like they’re a 1979 printing from Great Britian. She no doubt got them off eBay at some point or another. I happened across the copyright page of one of these puppies and I found this notice at the bottom of the page:

Except in the United States Of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

That’s kind of crazy. That says that you can’t sell or even give away the book if it has a cover that differs at all from the original. I’ve seen books that give a warning that if you bought the book with the cover torn off then you should know that it was reported to the publisher as being destroyed and they don’t get any money for it. (Even this site has such a notice) I’m guessing the above is some sort of an attempt at enforcing that. It says “except in the united states” because our copyright law specificially states that the publisher looses control of a copy once it’s sold. You’re free to sell or rent or do w/e with the copy (the key being as long as you aren’t making more copies..) and the copyright holder can have no say in the matter. This is generally known as the Right of First Sale. There are some exceptions, but not for anything as simple as books. It seems rather sill that, if the cover got torn off a book, I wouldn’t even be able to give the dumb thing away. I’m left wondering if this notice still appears in books outside of the US today…

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I imagine this is fairly obvious to anyone who has their music collection mostly contained on one computer/playback device, so I suppose this is more geared towards those who haven’t done this.

When I say MP3 I don’t really mean MP3. Insert your favorite codec here. It doesn’t really particularly matter, though it’s probably to your advantage to use DRM (copy protection) free formats. We’ve had most of our music on a computer for quite a while now. It was then that I realized the advantage of this and started to want a portable player with hard drive. To me it’s fairly simple. I have all kinds of old music that I otherwise wouldn’t usually listen to. The CD would sit unused for who knows how long. When browsing through CD’s I would end up picking something newer/more familiar to play instead of the older stuff, even though it of course has good music on it otherwise I would never have bought it in the first place.

If all I have to do is take 10 seconds to navigate through my music collection and then hit play, it becomes more desirable. For me even, I’ll just play a bunch of stuff randomly. I might not have chosen it, but when it comes on I’ll like it. This is the huge advantage of having all(or a good part) of your music at your fingertips.

My iPod (of course any portable player with a hard drive has more or less the same effect) just extends this. Now I can take my music with me. I’m also able to listen to it around the house more freely. Milenka and I have different musical tastes to some extent, and even though my computer will serve up all of my music to my stereo via TiVo, it’s often not an option because she doesn’t want to hear my crap . (On top of that too, a TiVo couldn’t organize music in a decent manner to save it’s life. It’s good for listening to a specific album, but unless I want to start messing around with my directory structures (I don’t….who would?) it can’t get more inventive than that.)

That said, it’s import for us to have the right to use our music this way. I’m sure that the RIAA would prefer that we not do this because suddenly our music is easy to share when its in this format. They think this leads to huge amounts of lost revenue, which it probably doesn’t (how much is hard to say, but their numbers are surely inflated). If anything, they’d prefer everything be stored in some copy-protected format where you’d be limited in one of various ways to how you can copy your music. Could you imagine buying a new computer but being unable to copy your music to it and then having to buy it again? Sure sounds good to me…This last paragraph doesn’t have much of a point beyond it’s important that we maintain a right to use our music as we choose after we’ve purchased it. This doesn’t mean that we should be allowed to just give out free copies to everyone so they don’t have to buy it, but it also doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be able to give a copy to someone to try out. It also doesn’t mean that we should be restricted in how we use our own music just to stop said copying.

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Fair use is term associated with copyright law. It refers to situations where it is legal for someone to make a copy of part or all of a work without obtaining the author’s permission (please note that when I say author I really mean copyright holder, which may or may not be the actual author). It is spelled out in section 107 of copyright law. A couple of useful sources of information is this summary as well as Stanford’s Copyright and Fair Use Center (this has lots of various information).

Fair use is very important. We see it in action all the time and don’t realize it. Some common examples include a teacher making copies from a book to hand out to the class, quotations in papers, parodies, and the “backing up” of media (this includes making a tape for your car (I hope you really aren’t doing any more though.. ), making CD’s with various songs on them and using your VCR/DVR to record shows). Without fair use you literally wouldn’t be allowed to make copies of anything under copyright for any reason without getting the author’s permission first. MP3 players would be outlawed along with VCR’s and DVR’s. It would be difficult at best to actually have a commentary on anything because you wouldn’t be able to quote, show images, or play sounds of what you’re talking about. Education costs would either skyrocket or education would decrease in quality as suddenly many useful aids could not be used. Research would be hindered as it would be illegal for certain types of research to be conducted (this is actually already the case).

Fair use has come under fire in recent years. In 1998, an extension to US copyright law, called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), was enacted that made many startling changes that shifted control away from the public and towards copyright holders. I’ll write much more on it later, but it’s impact on fair use is foggy. It contradicts many fair use guidelines including the above mentioned mention hindrance on research. It accomplishes this by outlawing the reverse engineering of software (that is, pulling it apart and seeing how it works). This process can lead to flaws being discovered in software, which is both why it is important for the public to have as a right and why copyright holders want it outlawed.

The DMCA is the major problem here. Fair use has become a fuzzy thing. What was once OK under fair use is now either not OK when we’re working with digital copies or it is questionable. The only way these issues get resolved is in the courts where a precedent must be set to clearly define what is OK and what is not (since the law doesn’t). Unfortunately, this takes much time and money. Many people would rather avoid copying than having to deal with the costs involved. Take me for example. Occasionally I’d love to post a short video clip of the Simpsons for a particularly funny joke. I can’t really do that though. Even though a clip of the length I’m thinking of should be covered under fair use, I’m pretty sure that Fox (they’re known to be EXTREMELY anal about allowing Simpsons content be copied) would have their lawyers contacting me and I don’t even want to mess with that.

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Ok, I’ll admit it. I’m a closet copyright activist. Well, sort of at least. Admittedly, I haven’t done much more than send off a few emails and faxes and post my thoughts to some message boards. I always mean to do more, but most of my day goes towards school and work these days and of course there’s always spending time with Milenka, eating and sleeping to consider… Plus I have an insatiable love for the dead doing nothing, and that doesn’t help either.

I can sadly say that I originally meant to write something about all of this back in July. That was when I read Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig. I highly recommend this book if you have any curiosity about what is happening with copyrights at all (or should you develop one in the near future..). I knew quite a bit about copyrights from information I’d gathered here and there over the years, but this book brought it all together. Most of it was stuff I’d heard before but there were some new things as well. I’d certainly never seen anything quite so complete, though admittedly I’d never looked for a book. By the way, you can download the book for free using that link. It’s released under a creative commons license, which I’ll talk about some other time. It basically says you can do anything you want with it as long as you give the author credit and it is for non-commercial purposes. You can read it, pass copies around and even use it in things you make as long as you follow those two rules (there’s a link on the site that explains exactly).

I don’t think most people understand exactly what copyrights are. They are a limited protection of certain works for a limited time (that is the intent anyways). It allows me to specify how my work gets copied. There are certain rights referred to as “fair use” that allow individuals to make copies/parts of copies in certain situations regardless of the copyright. When the copyright expires, the works go into the public domain. This means that they’re free for use by anyone. It isn’t quite as free as one might imagine because individual translations, performances, etc can be copyrighted, but the heart of the matter is still free. The idea here is that a free exchange of ideas will promote new ones. To some people, this almost seems a contradictory idea given our capitalist nature. Giving away free books might take away from local shops selling said books, after all.

I first became really interested in copyrights around the time of the whole Napster phenomenon. I was in high school at the time and being a geek I was of course interested in what was going on with Napster on all levels. From there onward I followed the course of the filesharing networks as well as other ploys by the music industry to try to make music secure (there were many attempts to make CD’s uncopyable that mostly resulted in some CD players unable to play them as well..). I think this was a natural extension of something I had been interested in since I started using computers years earlier, which was the copyright protection put forth on video games. For anyone who never played computer games in the olden days (most prevalent before CD’s), many of them did some check at startup and/or periodically throughout the game as you played. The check was usually something like “please enter the third word on the sixth line of page 32 of the manual”. It might give you a couple of chances (different question each time though) and if you got it wrong the program wouldn’t run. There were lots of variations (involving the manual/other documentation that came with the game as well as other methods), but this was the most common as I remember it. The whole thing was a game of cat and mouse. Crackers (not the crackers of today, which are technically what most of the public thinks of as hackers (someone who breaks into places and does whatever)) would release patches to get around this stuff so that copies could be run without the manual and/or the original disk(s). Software companies would come up with some innovative new way of protecting their software and the crackers would come up with some innovative new way of breaking it. We see the same thing today with the p2p networks. One gets shutdown and new ones that are more difficult to shut down arise to replace it.

Anyways, there’s a lot of issues here. Going back to my game example, the programs released by crackers were definitely used by people to just make copies and avoid paying for software. On the other hand, they were also used by people who actually owned the software who didn’t want to keep the manual around and look stuff up all the time. The same issue arises with programs like DeCSS (original program to break DVD encryption) and all p2p networks today. They can be used for illegal purpose, but there are legit reasons for their use as well. Unfortunately, we have laws such as the DMCA that make all uses of some things like this illegal (the DMCA was cause to make DeCSS illegal even though it’s original purpose was to allow DVD playback on linux).

As stated in the US constitution, the purpose of copyrights is to further creativity. Often times these days the purpose is to generate money for copyright holders. I don’t have the exact numbers on me, but the length of a copyright term has been extended many times in the past 50 years. A good example is that whenever Steamboat Willie comes up to enter the public domain Disney lobbies and suddenly it’s covered again. I think copyright currently covers works for something like 90 years unless you’re an individual, in which case it covers for 70 years after you die. My numbers probably aren’t exactly correct here, but that’s the basic idea. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t consider publishing anything if I knew I’d only be getting money for 50 years after I was dead. It’s a good thing we’ve extended it as far as we have. Copyrights are supposed to be limited, but they’re not really limited if we just extent the term every time things are about ready to enter the public domain. It’s good to note as well that probably 95%+ works from that era aren’t brining in money anymore. Those works are getting drug along for the ride and they’re not publicly available for no real reason.

What we’re seeing is a shift in power. It’s moving away from the public and towards the copyright holders. Why and how? Certain groups have a lot of money to gain by maintaining their monopoly and they’re willing to spend the money to lobby congress to get their way. Fair use rights are going down the tubes. Even in cases where they are still there, the way our legal system is setup it’s nearly impossible to defend yourself. Let’s take the RIAA for example. They’re suing filesharers. Ok. Are these people all guilty? Does it matter? No particularly. Probably some of them (I’m sure many of them couldn’t even come close though) could argue fair use rights for what they’re sharing. Here’s the problem. The RIAA (or any large organization) will be able to through a lot of lawyers and money at the case. By the time Joe Fileshare pays a lawyer (or lawyers even) and they spend tons of time (and therefore money) navigating the legal system and win, they may burn through $50, $100, $200+ thousand. The RIAA offers a settlement of $10,000. It might suck down all of someone’s life savings, but it’s cheaper than going the other way. The law is so fuzzy that it often becomes impossible for most people to fight.

There are so many sub-topics here. I can make a lot of posts out of all of this. Expect more sometime in the next 6 months ;P

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I happened to see part of a show the other day ($25 million hoax) and I saw something that I’ve seen before but which server to remind me of our sad state of affairs. On person was wearing a superman T-shirt. It was blue with the big red and yellow shield with an S on it. They blurred it out. I’m speculating here, but I’m guessing it’s because they didn’t want to be sued for using the symbol.

The guy wasn’t on camera all that much. They probably could have even shown him less. This seems to me like a simple matter of fair use. We’re not seeing it for all that long. Perhaps just as important, why would a copyright holder want to suppress the image at all? It’s free publicity. Our paranoia has grown to a point where that’s not possible though. It apparently just needed to be blurred out for whatever reason. How sad.

In a bit of an aside, another person was wearing a shirt from Children of Bodom, one of my favorite bands. It didn’t get blurred….

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