Steven Levy on MSNBC:

I certainly was aware that some members of Congress wanted to snuff out the grass-roots phenomena of people’s swapping copyrighted songs on the Net. But I assumed that the crime of file-sharing, joyfully committed by an estimated 60 million pirates, was mainly a problem of lost revenues for the music industry. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, giving the opening testimony, argued otherwise, calling file-sharing networks a grave security risk to this nation. In reality, the hearing was nothing but one of several signs of a new hardball offensive against file-sharing for the same old reasons: protecting the business model of the record labels.

[…]

My guess is that the vast majority of those 60 million file sharers would never steal a physical object from the store. In a mixture of self-interest and rebellion they’ve taken the measure of the record industry’s karma (overpriced CDs, a history of ripping off artists), noted that stealing files isn’t like stealing stuff (maybe they’ll buy a disc later) and concluded that file-sharing isn’t that bad….

Lucid editorial on the RIAA’s war says the EFF.

[via Algorhythm → EFFector]

Sandra Abma, World at Six TORONTO – As the American recording industry steps up its fight against the illegal sharing of music online, Canadians are starting to look at the U.S. model.Peer-to-peer file sharing, or downloading, of music has cost the North American recording industry billions of dollars.

In Canada, CD sales have dropped 20 per cent in the past three years.The American recording industry’s latest attempt to squash music piracy is a two-pronged approach: sanctioning a number of online music services and intensifying litigation against what they call « music pirates. »Americans can legally download music online – paying from US $0.79 per song on sites like Buymusic.com and Apple’s iTunes music store – but those who continue to do so illegally are being singled out by harsh legislation.

A new bill before the House of Congress proposes a five-year prison sentence and a fine of US $250,000 for the sharing of just one music file on a peer-to-peer network.The Canadian Recording Industry Association has so far taken a softer approach to online music sharing, choosing an education program aimed at young music fans. However, the apparent success of U.S attempts has prompted CRIA president Brian Robertson to look into the American model. »There’s been quite a substantive drop in peer-to-peer activity, » Robertson said. « Particularly young people, who possibly didn’t know it was illegal before, now know it’s illegal and now are getting a little bit intimidated by subpoenas being served and penalties. » And now Canadians will be able to legally download music too. This fall, both Buymusic.com and the Apple iTunes service will be made available to Canadians. A Canadian service, called Puretracks.com, is also being introduced.Customers have been eagerly looking forward to this, said Puretracks.com co-founder Alister (sic) Mitchell. « Technology moves like lightning. It takes a lot longer to work through the labyrinth, the copyright ownership, that’s involved in any one particular track, in any one particular CD. »Music lovers will pay for online music if the service is easy, the music of high quality, and the process legal, Mitchell said.

[from CBC ArtsCanada]

Thanks Brightblue

i.never.nu:

Robert X. Cringely as come up with a crazy (or is it?) scheme for music sharing and paiement; he calls it Snapster. The theory, which he as supposedly checked with a few lawyer friends, is that a company could be created to become a sort of mutual fund of music albums where every share owner would have a legal right to copy every song on the thousands of album the starting funds would allow Snapster to buy. That’s the one line summary of a pretty detailed idea where he also includes numbers to « support » his theory.

So it’s basically a private library. Nice concept except that the original media transfer, from the CD to the HDs is what killed my.mp3.com and I don’t see how this system overcomes this hurdle.

Also, fair use does not apply (IIRC) to profit making endeavours, like this plan. Otherwise, it’s not fair use, it’s a normal unlicensed copy.

Time and space shifting are still only fair use defences to infringement in US law, which I don’t think you can use to protect the acts of a company that would not be themselves protected by fair use, even if you own that company or if it acts on your behalf. One could argue this is different with our « fair dealing » doctrine, but that’s really a long shot.

The private library concept is excellent though, maybe a co-op model would even be better, skirting the profit making part, but that would also eliminate the economical value for the music industry, which seems to be an important aspect of the Snapster scheme.

The problem I see with these celestial jukebox wannabes is that to make online distribution possible, you need to do an act that is still generally considered a « copy » in the physical sense of the word. Maybe an elaborate system enforcing a « one listener at a time » rule might convince a judge that although bits are replicated, the system is functionally equivalent to « lending » or « sharing » works on a physical medium? The alternatives being individually licensing works, à la iTunes Music store, compulsory licensing scheme or a modification to copyright law to make sharing digital files possible without them being considered a copy or a public performance of some sort.

I think there is room for all three in the market. The store works well for most purposes. I’d like to see a compulsory licensing for streaming, and legislative modification, to give people the same rights they enjoy in the physical sphere.

Am I still allowed to invite a couple buddies over to watch a video?

(oh, and Roxio already owns snapster.com)

Update: great post by Charles Miller, found on a K5 discussion: All in all, a brilliant hack of the legal code. And totally useless. […] The law is not code. It is not compiled into an inviolate binary and run by a deterministic system. It is passed through the heads of human beings whose job it is to interpret the intent of the law.

Micheal Geist’s latest column in the Toronto Star tells of the merits of slow regulation.

He mentions that the meme was (or still is) that government are too slow for the rapids advancements of technology while the private sector is best suited to adapt rapidly and provide effective auto-regulation.

Yet, privacy regulation by the private sector has gone nowhere in the US. Internet governance by ICANN, instead of the ITU (which was apparently the « obvious alternative ») has not been a stellar success either.

He goes on praising the regulatory approach of the the Canadian government, which I think can be summarized as « yeah, were working on it ».

Other obvious examples: the DMCA, first implementations (I think) of the TRIPS protection requirements, and the various post 9/11 knee-jerks, rushed regulatory processes .

So basically, the private sector should move fast while the administrations should move slowly. Fair enough but I’ll reserve my opinions when we see the results of our own copyright reform process.

Chi va piano, va sano apparently.

Thanks Cla

Kuro5hin is back from their server rebuilding holiday and I can point to a post on the copyright of the Happy Birthday song.

Compare to Snopes writeup.

Text of a
letter (pdf) sent to Dr. Kamil Idris, Director General of WIPO.

Dear Dr. Idris:
In recent years there has been an explosion of open and collaborative projects to create public goods. These projects are extremely important, and they raise profound questions regarding appropriate intellectual property policies. They also provide evidence that one can achieve a high level of innovation in some areas of the modern economy without intellectual property protection, and indeed excessive, unbalanced, or poorly designed intellectual property protections may be counter-productive. We ask that the World Intellectual Property Organization convene a meeting in calendar year 2004 to examine these new open collaborative development models, and to discuss their relevance for public policy.

Broad enough to get general support and, although one could argue that more meeting scheduling is not something to hope for, or that this could also have been folded nicely into the WSIS, I do agree that it would be nice to get a declaration that IPRs are not the be-all end-all of development, progress and equity.

The
appendix to the letter lists seven areas where innovation can occur
without intellectual property protection or even where IP protection
hampers innovation.

Amongst the signatories are three of the faculty members present at ILaw, Yochai Benkler, Larry Lessig and Jonathan Zittrain, and many other notables.

[Emerging Technologies → Open
Access News]

I had not linked to Wendy Seltzer’s blog yet.

She posted on her visit and presentation at ILaw, which was part of a very nice panel on copyrights, culture and peer-to-peer. Click through for more.

She also links to the guy who trademarked « freedom of expression« .

And I wish all the presenters would be so kind and post their slides.

I didn’t have a digital camera myself but Frank captured the star of the Thursday night show.

Of course, I end up with a beer in my hands… Classic, or maybe just a statistical probability.

The chickens are dead. Get over it.

Larry Lessig

Well that’s it. It was definitely worth the trip. Thanks to everyone, presenters and participants.

I feel like I’m trying to drink from a fire hose. I’m hearing the conference and I’m trying to keep up with all the reports.

David Hornik has his account on VentureBlog.

John Palfrey has notes about the last two days.

Frank Fields is still at it, with a mention of last night.

Donna Wentworth is still the official blogging reference, and she has nice notes on Copyfight by James Grimmelmann on yesterday’s session.

I’m not blogging much, but I’m enjoying the show.

Jim Flowers is writing about the conference too (the usual suspects are still hammering away).

Lisa Rein is videotaping everything (watch for a lot of me as Lessig sits on my desk when the footage is made available), and so are the ILaw people.

It’s really worth being here because the show is excellent, but with all the notes from the bloggers, I can’t help to wonder if a motivated individual could not get most the the instructional value of the conference through those reports without actually bothering to register to come here.

I guess it’s an old question that was assessed by everyone who puts courseware online.

Greplaw m’apprends, que Jean-Michel Tremblay à l’Université du Québec à Chicoutimi rend disponible les « Classiques des Sciences Sociales« , une collection de textes qui sont passés dans le domaine public au Canada.

Le problème c’est que les PUF n’aiment pas du tout qu’il publie des textes pour lesquels le droit d’auteur est périmé ici (vie + 50 ans) mais pas en France (vie + 70 ans).

Article de Libé

Une sorte d’Eldred local en somme… Ça pourrait devenir très intéressant.

La nouvelle de Greplaw est attribuée à un blog qui ne fait pourtant pas directement référence à l’affaire.

The History of Copyright: A Critical Overview With Source Texts in Five Languages. The website for this upcoming book has images and transcriptions of the Statute of Anne and some material on Donaldson v. Beckett.

A nice complement to Siva Vaidhyanathan’s Copyright and Copywrongs.

If you haven’t heard about the Eldred act, a.k.a. Public Domain Enhancement Act, it’s a proposition, championed by Larry Lessig, that would offer a 50 year copyright term, renewable for a nominal fee. It was recently introduced as a bill to the US congress.

Coverage by Donna Wentworth, Joi Ito and many more. There is also a petition and a nice article on First Monday that I mentioned before.

What I don’t fully understand is why the right owners don’t jump on the idea. The fees for renewal seem like they would be, for the foreseeable future, cheaper than the lobbying and litigation required to secure yet another extension of the basic copyright term. So in effect, it’s a perpetual copyright for all (even moderately) successful right owners, giving them at the same time a larger public domain pool to borrow from.

I am also puzzled (and maybe someone addressed this already) as how this fits in with Berne, that requires no registration formalities to get the full effect from copyrights. Or is it no formalities for the minimal life + 50 term of Berne?

The Eldred FAQ mentions this and I wonder what would happen if a longer term than life + 50 (which might not even be shorter than the publication + 50 term proposed in the Eldred Act in the case of posthumous works) was mandated by another treaty.

If we consider the raw deal, given the current US term of 95 years for work for hire, it would give 45 years less to the basic term. It would also add only 5 years to the current term for 1$ and at the burden of registration (exclusively for taxation purposes according to the Eldred web site). However, after that the ball keeps rolling and each renewal brings economies of scale. A more realistic deal that the Founder’s Copyright proposition.

It is also « better » than the current system in that it allows for perpetual ownership, although it is weird to talk about perpetuity when the current system has been in place for about 300 years, which could be viewed as 3 generations of works given the current terms…

It’s a very pragmatic solution. And I think it might even work very smoothly in practice. The obvious drawback being the identification of works needing registration. It might not always be obvious to sort out ownership in cases where there is a conflict during registration (we’d see people fighting to pay a tax…) or when there is an unclear title on a work. It also requires the identification of individual works prior to a infringement claim, which might not be obvious in some contexts.

Given the outcome of the Eldred case and the general trend in over protecting right owners against the perceived threat of piracy, this approach could be a better solution than following through with an effort to keep closer to what I consider the spirit of copyright: a situation under which all authors and works would be equally treated and no registration (or taxation) of works would bear any influence on the actual rights of those authors.

Therefore I’m not sure I like the Eldred proposition.

I’m not sold to the idea, but I do think it is an interesting and thought provoking proposition, and I don’t understand why the MPAA/RIAA et cie is not lobbying with Lessig for this. Would a 95 years initial term + 50 be an acceptable solution for them? Or do they feel the burden of sorting out ownership for registration in any context would be too much in any case? Do they fell they’ll see more profits coming from numerous incremental augmentations of the copyright term? Does this plan clash with the hope that copyright has no term, will eventually be considered like a property title and become a permanent and transmissible right?