Showing posts with label maximalists. Show all posts
Showing posts with label maximalists. Show all posts

05 March 2008

The Copyright Emperor Has No Clothes

Tim Lee has a stonker of a post on Ars Technica drawing parallels between copyright today and property rights debates of the 18th and 19th centuries in the US. It's a hugely-enjoyable, thought-provoking piece.

He also offers some commentary on his own words:

Copyright maximalists love to draw parallels between property rights and copyrights. But if we take that analogy seriously, I think it actually leads in some places that they aren't going to like. Our property rights system was not created by Congressional (or state legislative) fiat. Property rights in land is an organic, bottom up exercize. The job of government isn't to dictate what the property system should look like, but to formalize and reinforce the property arrangements people naturally agree to among themselves.

The fact that our current copyright system is widely ignored and evaded is a sign, I think, that Congress has done a poor job of aligning the copyright system with ordinary individuals' sense of right and wrong. Just as squatters 200 years ago didn't think it was right that they be booted off land they cleared and brought under cultivation in favor of an absentee landowner who had written a check to a distant federal government, so a lot of people feel it's unfair to fine a woman hundreds of thousands of dollars to share a couple of CDs' worth of music. You might believe (as do I) that file sharing is unethical, just as many people believed that squatting was unethical. But at some point, Congress has no choice but to recognize the realities on the ground, just as it did with real property in the 19th century.

As I've noted elsewhere on this blog, the copyright debate is really hotting up as people start to question the outrageous claims and assumptions of the maximalists. The great thing is, it's becoming increasingly obvious that the copyright emperor has no clothes.

02 May 2006

Will WIPO Wipe the Floor?

This is how the world ends, not with a bang - not with a clash of titans - but with a whimper, in an obscure WIPO committee. The committee in question rejoices in the moniker "U.N. World Intellectual Property Organization's Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights Committee". And this is how the report on the EFF's site lays out the effects of the current draft of its work:

The treaty would give broadcasters, cablecasters, and potentially webcasters, broad new 50 year rights to control transmissions over the Internet, irrespective of the copyright status of the transmitted material. It also requires countries to provide legal protection for broadcaster technological protection measures.

Essentially it would be a huge win for the major content owners, a huge win for the status quo, and a huge win for IP maximalists. As this piece from Boing Boing explains, those IP maximalists are largely in the US, and the proposals in this treaty are largely driven by their agenda of locking down all forms of content, everywhere in the world, in the belief that it will increase their profits, even if it will chill all kinds of creative expression in the process.

Nothing new there, then. But what is notable is how the battle is being taken behind the scenes - not in public forums where alternative viewpoints can be aired, and the erroneous logic of the proposal refuted - but in the dark, rank, chummy world of deadly-tedious drafting committees, where every trick in the book can be used to out-manoeuvre those fighting to defend creative freedom.

The treaty in question is a case in point. As the EFF report on the moves explains:

Webcasting is now back in the treaty, after spending last year in a separate "working paper" because the majority of countries opposed its inclusion in 2004. Despite many counties' opposition again in 2005, it’s been included in the treaty as a non-mandatory Appendix. Countries that sign the treaty have the option – at any time -- to grant webcasters the same exclusive rights given to broadcasters and cablecasters by depositing a notice with WIPO.

At the same time, some of the key proposals to balance the impact of the new treaty have been removed from the new draft treaty text (the Draft Basic Proposal) and relegated to a new separate "Working Paper". For instance, the alternative that the treaty not include the contentious Technological Protection Measure obligations is not in the Draft Basic Proposal, but has been sidelined to the Draft Working Paper.

Unfortunately, it is hard to see who is going to stop this. As more and more battles are won at the national level, so the fight over content moves up the stack, to supra-national bodies that wield immense power, are subject to little or no oversight, and which are largely aligned with the interests of the already-rich and the already-powerful against anybody who would like to share a little of that money and power.

Update 1: The EFF reports that webcasting is now out of the main treaty again, but that the threat in the longer-term remains.

Update 2: Here's a good report by James Love on where things now stand (via On the Commons).

23 April 2006

It Can't Get Any Worse - Or Can It?

You may think that the US DMCA is bad enough, since it "criminalizes production and dissemination of technology that can circumvent measures taken to protect copyright, not merely infringement of copyright itself, and heightens the penalties for copyright infringement on the Internet", as Wikipedia puts it.

But if you take a look at this news story, you'll see it can still get worse. It seems that the IP maximalists really want to nail everything down - even if that means soft parts of your anatomy get caught in the process.

And if you live outside the US, you can wipe that smile of smug satisfaction off your face. The DMCA has already led to the pernicious EU Copyright Directive; if the Americans are blessed with the joy and privilege of a DMCA++, rest assured that it will only be a matter of time before "IP harmonisation" demands that we follow suit.