This is too important not to read!

[kurttrail]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/magazine/25COPYRIGHT.html

Yes, I know they force you to subscribe, but it really is essential that
every thinking man & woman read this.

I'd like to thank My MSN for bringing it to my attention. ;-)

--
Peace!
Kurt
Self-anointed Moderator
microscum.pubic.windowsexp.gonorrhea
http://microscum.com
"Trustworthy Computing" is only another example of an Oxymoron!
"Produkt-Aktivierung macht frei!"

[Torgeir Bakken (MVP)]

kurttrail wrote:

> http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/magazine/25COPYRIGHT.html
>
> Yes, I know they force you to subscribe, but it really is essential that
> every thinking man & woman read this.
>
> I'd like to thank My MSN for bringing it to my attention. ;-)

United States, the land of the unfree ;-)


--
torgeir
Microsoft MVP Scripting and WMI, Porsgrunn Norway
Administration scripting examples and an ONLINE version of the 1328 page
Scripting Guide: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter

[Gary Edstrom]

On Sun, 25 Jan 2004 11:20:39 -0500, "kurttrail"
> wrote:

> http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/magazine/25COPYRIGHT.html
>
>Yes, I know they force you to subscribe, but it really is essential that
>every thinking man & woman read this.
>
>I'd like to thank My MSN for bringing it to my attention. ;-)

Could you give us a brief idea of what the article is about? I refuse
to give the NYT my personal information in order to subscribe, and I am
NOT going to give phony information just so I can read the article.

--
Gary Edstrom >
Visit my Midway Island home page at http://gbe.dynip.com/Midway
Cubical prisoner #142765.
The above tagline is number 107 in a series of 547. Collect them all!

The Tyranny of Copyright?
By ROBERT S. BOYNTON

Last fall, a group of civic-minded students at Swarthmore
College received a sobering lesson in the future of
political protest. They had come into possession of some
15,000 e-mail messages and memos -- presumably leaked or
stolen -- from Diebold Election Systems, the largest maker
of electronic voting machines in the country. The memos
featured Diebold employees' candid discussion of flaws in
the company's software and warnings that the computer
network was poorly protected from hackers. In light of the
chaotic 2000 presidential election, the Swarthmore
students decided that this information shouldn't be kept
from the public. Like aspiring Daniel Ellsbergs with their
would-be Pentagon Papers, they posted the files on the
Internet, declaring the act a form of electronic whistle-
blowing.

Unfortunately for the students, their actions ran afoul of
the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (D.M.C.A.), one
of several recent laws that regulate intellectual property
and are quietly reshaping the culture. Designed to protect
copyrighted material on the Web, the act makes it possible
for an Internet service provider to be liable for the
material posted by its users -- an extraordinary burden
that providers of phone service, by contrast, do not
share. Under the law, if an aggrieved party (Diebold, say)
threatens to sue an Internet service provider over the
content of a subscriber's Web site, the provider can avoid
liability simply by removing the offending material. Since
the mere threat of a lawsuit is usually enough to scare
most providers into submission, the law effectively gives
private parties veto power over much of the information
published online -- as the Swarthmore students would soon
learn.

Not long after the students posted the memos, Diebold sent
letters to Swarthmore charging the students with copyright
infringement and demanding that the material be removed
from the students' Web page, which was hosted on the
college's server. Swarthmore complied. The question of
whether the students were within their rights to post the
memos was essentially moot: thanks to the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act, their speech could be silenced
without the benefit of actual lawsuits, public hearings,
judges or other niceties of due process.

After persistent challenges by the students -- and a
considerable amount of negative publicity for Diebold --
in November the company agreed not to sue. To the delight
of the students' supporters, the memos are now back on
their Web site. But to proponents of free speech on the
Internet, the story remains a chilling one.

Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media scholar at New York
University , calls anecdotes like this ''copyright horror
stories,'' and there have been a growing number of them
over the past few years. Once a dry and seemingly
mechanical area of the American legal system, intellectual
property law can now be found at the center of major
disputes in the arts, sciences and -- as in the Diebold
case -- politics. Recent cases have involved everything
from attempts to force the Girl Scouts to pay royalties
for singing songs around campfires to the infringement
suit brought by the estate of Margaret Mitchell against
the publishers of Alice Randall's book ''The Wind Done
Gone'' (which tells the story of Mitchell's ''Gone With
the Wind'' from a slave's perspective) to corporations
like Celera Genomics filing for patents for human genes.
The most publicized development came in September, when
the Recording Industry Association of America began suing
music downloaders for copyright infringement, reaching out-
of-court settlements for thousands of dollars with
defendants as young as 12. And in November, a group of
independent film producers went to court to fight a ban,
imposed this year by the Motion Picture Association of
America, on sending DVD's to those who vote for annual
film awards.

Not long ago, the Internet's ability to provide instant,
inexpensive and perfect copies of text, sound and images
was heralded with the phrase ''information wants to be
free.'' Yet the implications of this freedom have
frightened some creators -- particularly those in the
recording, publishing and movie industries -- who argue
that the greater ease of copying and distribution
increases the need for more stringent intellectual
property laws. The movie and music industries have
succeeded in lobbying lawmakers to allow them to tighten
their grips on their creations by lengthening copyright
terms. The law has also extended the scope of copyright
protection, creating what critics have called
a ''paracopyright,'' which prohibits not only duplicating
protected material but in some cases even gaining access
to it in the first place. In addition to the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act, the most significant piece of
new legislation is the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act,
which added 20 years of protection to past and present
copyrighted works and was upheld by the Supreme Court a
year ago. In less than a decade, the much-ballyhooed
liberating potential of the Internet seems to have given
way to something of an intellectual land grab, presided
over by legislators and lawyers for the media industries.

In response to these developments, a protest movement is
forming, made up of lawyers, scholars and activists who
fear that bolstering copyright protection in the name of
foiling ''piracy'' will have disastrous consequences for
society -- hindering the ability to experiment and create
and eroding our democratic freedoms. This group of
reformers, which Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford
Law School, calls the ''free culture movement,'' might
also be thought of as the ''Copy Left'' (to borrow a term
originally used by software programmers to signal that
their product bore fewer than the usual amount of
copyright restrictions). Lawyers and professors at the
nation's top universities and law schools, the members of
the Copy Left aren't wild-eyed radicals opposed to the use
of copyright, though they do object fiercely to the way
copyright has been distorted by recent legislation and
manipulated by companies like Diebold. Nor do they share a
coherent political ideology. What they do share is a fear
that the United States is becoming less free and
ultimately less creative. While the American copyright
system was designed to encourage innovation, it is now,
they contend, being used to squelch it. They see
themselves as fighting for a traditional understanding of
intellectual property in the face of a radical effort to
turn copyright law into a tool for hoarding ideas. ''The
notion that intellectual property rights should never
expire, and works never enter the public domain -- this is
the truly fanatical and unconstitutional position,'' says
Jonathan Zittrain, a co-founder of the Berkman Center for
Internet and Society at Harvard Law School , the
intellectual hub of the Copy Left.

Thinkers like Lessig and Zittrain promote a vision of a
world in which copyright law gives individual creators the
exclusive right to profit from their intellectual property
for a brief, limited period -- thus providing an incentive
to create while still allowing successive generations of
creators to draw freely on earlier ideas. They stress that
borrowing and collaboration are essential components of
all creation and caution against being seduced by the
romantic myth of ''the author'': the lone garret-dwelling
poet, creating masterpieces out of thin air. ''No one
writes from nothing,'' says Yochai Benkler, a professor at
Yale Law School . ''We all take the world as it is and use
it, remix it.''

Where does the Copy Left believe a creation ought to go
once its copyright has lapsed? Into the public domain, or
the ''cultural commons'' -- a shared stockpile of ideas
where the majority of America 's music and literature
would reside, from which anyone could partake without
having to pay or ask permission. James Boyle, a professor
at Duke Law School , notes that the public domain is a
necessity for social and cultural progress, not some sort
of socialist luxury. ''Our art, our culture, our science
depend on this public domain,'' he has written, ''every
bit as much as they depend on intellectual property.''

In opposition to the cultural commons stands
the ''permission culture,'' an epithet the Copy Left uses
to describe the world it fears our current copyright law
is creating. Whereas you used to own the CD or book you
purchased, in the permission culture it is more likely
that you'll lease (or ''license'') a song, video or e-
book, and even then only under restrictive conditions:
read your e-book, but don't copy and paste any selections;
listen to music on your MP3 player, but don't burn it onto
a CD or transfer it to your stereo. The Copy Left sees
innovations like iTunes, Apple's popular online music
store, as the first step toward a society in which much of
the cultural activity that we currently take for granted --
reading an encyclopedia in the public library, selling a
geometry textbook to a friend, copying a song for a
sibling -- will be rerouted through a system of
micropayments in return for which the rights to ever
smaller pieces of our culture are doled out. ''Sooner or
later,'' predicts Miriam Nisbet, the legislative counsel
for the American Library Association, ''you'll get to the
point where you say, 'Well, I guess that 25 cents isn't
too much to pay for this sentence,' and then there's no
hope and no going back.''

There is a growing sense of urgency among the members of
the Copy Left. They worry that if they do not raise
awareness of what is happening to copyright law, Americans
will be stuck forever with the consequences of decisions
now being made -- and laws being passed -- in the name of
preventing piracy. ''We are at a moment in our history at
which the terms of freedom and justice are up for grabs,''
Benkler says. He notes that each major innovation in the
history of communications -- the printing press, radio,
telephone -- was followed by a brief period of openness
before the rules of its usage were determined and
alternatives eliminated. ''The Internet,'' he says, ''is
in that space right now.''

America has always had an ambivalent attitude toward the
notion of intellectual property. Thomas Jefferson, for
one, considered copyright a necessary evil: he favored
providing just enough incentive to create, nothing more,
and thereafter allowing ideas to flow freely as nature
intended. ''If nature has made any one thing less
susceptible than all others of exclusive property,'' he
wrote, ''it is the action of the thinking power called an
idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long
as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged,
it forces itself into the possession of everyone.'' His
conception of copyright was enshrined in Article 1,
Section 8 of the Constitution, which gives Congress the
authority to ''promote the progress of science and useful
arts, by securing for limited times to authors and
inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings
and discoveries.''

But Jefferson 's vision has not fared well. As the
country's economy developed from agrarian to industrial
to ''information,'' ideas took on greater importance, and
the demand increased for stronger copyright laws. In 1790,
copyright protection lasted for 14 years and could be
renewed just once before the work entered the public
domain. Between 1831 and 1909, the maximum term was
increased from 28 to 56 years. Today, copyright protection
for individuals lasts for 70 years after the death of the
author; for corporations, it's 95 years after publication.
Over the past three decades, the flow of material entering
the public domain has slowed to a trickle: in 1973,
according to Lessig, more than 85 percent of copyright
owners chose not to renew their copyrights, allowing their
ideas to become common coin; since the 1998 Copyright Term
Extension Act lengthened present and past copyrights for
an additional 20 years, little material will enter the
public domain any time soon.

Some of the changes that expanded copyright protection
were made with an understanding of their effects; what
also troubles the Copy Left, however, are the unintended
consequences of seemingly innocuous tweaks in copyright
legislation. In particular, two laws that were passed
years before the creation of the Internet helped set the
stage for today's copyright bonanza. Before the 1909
Copyright Act, copyright was construed as the exclusive
right to ''publish'' a creation; but the 1909 law changed
the wording to prohibit others from ''copying'' one's
creation -- a seemingly minor change that thereafter
linked copyright protection to the copying technology of
the day, whether that was the pen, the photocopy machine,
the VCR or the Internet. In 1976, a revision to the law
dispensed with the requirement of formally registering or
renewing a copyright in order to comply with international
copyright standards. Henceforth, everything -- from e-mail
messages to doodles on a napkin -- was automatically
copyrighted the moment it was ''fixed in a tangible
medium.''

The true significance of these two laws didn't become
apparent until the arrival of the Internet, when every
work became automatically protected by copyright and every
use of a work via the Internet constituted a new
copy. ''Nobody realized that eliminating those
requirements would create a nightmare of uncertainty and
confusion about what content is available to use,'' Lessig
explains, ''which is a crucial question now that the
Internet is the way we gain access to so much content. It
was a kind of oil spill in the free culture.''

Lessig is one of the most prominent and eloquent defenders
of the Copy Left's belief that copyright law should return
to its Jeffersonian roots. ''We are invoking ideas that
should be central to the American tradition, such as that
a free society is richer than a control society,'' he
says. ''But in the cultural sphere, big media wants to
build a new Soviet empire where you need permission from
the central party to do anything.'' He complains that
Americans have been reduced to ''an Oliver Twist-like
position,'' in which they have to ask, ''Please, sir, may
I?'' every time we want to use something under copyright --
and then only if we are fortunate enough to have the
assistance of a high-priced lawyer.

In October 2002, Lessig argued before the Supreme Court in
Eldred v. Ashcroft, which concerned a challenge to the
Copyright Term Extension Act. On behalf of the plaintiffs,
Lessig argued that perpetually extending the term of
copyright was a violation of the Constitution's
requirement that copyright exist for ''a limited time.''
The court responded that although perhaps unwise on policy
grounds, granting such extensions was within Congress's
power. It was a major setback for the Copy Left. Given the
Eldred decision, there is nothing to stop a future
Congress from extending copyright's term again and again.

Lessig's efforts haven't been limited to the courtroom. In
2001, he was part of a group that founded an organization
called Creative Commons, which offers individual creators
the ability to carefully calibrate the level of control
they wish to maintain over their works. The organization
services the needs of, say, musicians who want rappers and
D.J.'s to be able to download and remix their music
without legal trouble or of writers who want their works
republished without charge, but only by nonprofit
publications. The Commons has developed a software
application for the Web that allows copyright holders who
do not want to exercise all of the restrictions of
copyright law to dedicate their work to the public domain
or license it on terms that allow copying and creative
reuses. The aim of Creative Commons is not only to
increase the sum of raw source material online but also to
make it cheaper and easier for other creators to locate
and access that material. This will enable people to use
the Internet to find, for example, photographs that are
free to be altered or reused or texts that may be copied,
distributed or sampled -- all by their authors'
permission. The Creative Commons now has a presence in 10
countries, including Brazil , whose minister of culture,
the musician Gilberto Gil, plans to release some of his
songs under the Creative Commons license so that others
may freely borrow from them. Creative Commons is currently
talking to Amazon and others about a plan to release out-
of-print books under Creative Commons licenses.

One of the central ideas of the Copy Left is that the
Internet has been a catalyst for re-engaging with the
culture -- for interacting with the things we read and
watch and listen to, as opposed to just sitting back and
absorbing them. This vision of how culture works stands in
contrast to what the Copy Left calls the ''broadcast
model'' -- the arrangement in which a small group of
content producers disseminate their creations (television,
movies, music) through controlled routes (cable, theaters,
radio-TV stations) to passive consumers. Yochai Benkler,
the law professor at Yale, argues that people want to be
more engaged in their culture, despite the broadcast
technology, like television, that he says has narcotized
us. ''People are users,'' he says. ''They are producers,
storytellers, consumers, interactors -- complex, varied
beings, not just people who go to the store, buy a
packaged good off the shelf and consume.''

A few weeks ago, I met Benkler in his loft in downtown New
York . He stroked his beard while explicating his ideas
with the care of a man parsing a particularly knotty
question of Scripture. Benkler was born in Tel Aviv in
1964, and while in his 20's, he helped found a remote
desert kibbutz in an attempt to recapture the Zionist
movement's original socialist spirit. The challenges of
creating a community in isolation from the rest of society
ultimately proved overwhelming. ''After a few years,'' he
said, ''we realized that at the rate we were going we
wouldn't attend college until we were in our 50's.'' It
was a hard lesson in the difficulty of producing anything -
- a community, a work of art -- in isolation.

But Benkler's belief in the importance of creating things
in common rests on more than anecdotal evidence. What
makes his argument more than wishful thinking, he said, is
that he has some economic evidence for his view. ''Let's
compare a few numbers,'' he said. ''How much do people pay
the recording industry to listen to music versus how much
people pay the telephone industry to talk to their friends
and family? The recording industry is a $12 billion a year
business, compared with the telephone business, which is a
more than $250 billion a year business. That is what
economists call a 'revealed willingness to pay,' a clear
preference for a technology that allows you to participate
in work, socializing and interaction in general, over a
technology that allows you to be a passive consumer of a
packaged good. Is that a study of human nature? No. Is it
an economic measure that would suggest there is a lot of
demand out there for speaking and listening to others?
Yes.''

According to Benkler, the cultural commons not only offers
a better model for creativity; it makes good economic
sense. Like Lessig and other members of the Copy Left, he
takes his bearings from the free software movement and
views the success of products like Linux and services like
Google as evidence of a viable collaborative (or ''peer to
peer'') model for producing and sharing ideas -- a model
that will augment and, in some cases, replace the current
model. (He concedes that some products, like novels and
blockbuster movies, will never be produced peer to peer,
though they will draw on the work of artists before them.)

Benkler predicts that the recording industry will be one
of the first businesses to go. ''All it does is package
and sell goods,'' he said, ''which is technically an
unfeasible way of continuing. They are trying their best
to legislate the environment to change, but that doesn't
mean we have to let them.''

The battle between the Copy Left and its opponents is as
much a clash of worldviews as of legal doctrine. Aligned
against the Copy Left are those who sympathize with the
romantic notion of authorship and view the culture as a
market in which everything of value should be owned by
someone or other. Jane Ginsburg, a professor at Columbia
Law School who specializes in copyright law, fears that in
the Copy Left's rush to secure the public domain, it gives
short shrift to the author. A self-described ''copyright
enthusiast,'' Ginsburg considers the author the moral
center of copyright law and questions equating copyright
control with corporate greed. ''Copyright cannot be
understood merely as a grudgingly tolerated way station on
the road to the public domain,'' she writes in a recent
article titled ''The Concept of Authorship in Comparative
Copyright Law.'' ''Because copyright arises out of the act
of creating a work, authors have moral claims that neither
corporate intermediaries nor consumer end-users can
(straightfacedly) assert.''

Ginsburg and others embrace many elements of
the ''permission society'' demonized by the Copy Left and
cite developments like the iTunes store as a sign of
greater consumer choice and freedom. In his
book ''Copyright's Highway,'' Paul Goldstein, a professor
at Stanford Law School , writes that ''the logic of
property rights dictates their extension into every corner
in which people derive enjoyment and value from literary
and artistic works.'' He characterizes the permission
society as a ''celestial jukebox'' in which access to
every creation -- music, literature, movies, art -- is
available to anyone for a price.

An entire ''digital rights management'' industry has
arisen to bring this vision to fruition, each company
calibrating a particular license through a system of
micropayments -- play a song on your computer for one
price; transfer it to your MP3 player for a slightly
higher fee. Goldstein argues that the scheme of a business
like iTunes is actually more efficient and democratic than
the commons model championed by the Copy Left. ''The
problem with the commons is that it doesn't take into
consideration the direction of the payment; it doesn't
reveal what kind of culture gets used and what kind
doesn't,'' he says. ''I think it is good to have a price
tag attached to each use because it tells producers what
consumers want; it lets them vote with their purchase for
the kinds of culture they want.''

But the Copy Left is convinced that there is a better way
for the entertainment industry to adapt to the Internet
age while still paying its artists their due. William
Fisher, director of the Berkman Center , has spent the
last three years devising an alternative compensation
system that would enable the entertainment industry to
restructure its business model without resorting to
cumbersome micropayments. He has worked out a modified
version of the system that artists' advocacy groups
currently use to make sure that composers are paid when
their music is performed or recorded. According to
Fisher's plan, all works capable of being transmitted
online would be registered with a central office (whether
government or independent is unclear). The central office
would then monitor how frequently a work is used and
compensate the creators on that basis. The money would
come from a tax on various content-related devices, like
DVD burners, blank CD's or digital recorders. It is a
brave proposal in a political culture that is allergic to
taxes and uncomfortable with complex solutions. Still, if
his numbers do indeed add up, Fisher's proposal might be
the best thing that ever happened to the cultural commons:
the creators would be paid, while every individual would
have unlimited access to every cultural creation.

Fisher and Charles Nesson, his colleague at Harvard Law
School , have showed this proposal to movie executives and
lawyers for several media conglomerates. Fisher says that
his ideas have been received with great interest by the
very industries -- music, home video -- that see their
business models disintegrating before their eyes.

When asked whether he thinks his ambitious scheme has a
chance, Fisher says that the likeliest possibility would
be for it to be adopted in countries that are neither so
developed that they have signed on to international
copyright protocols nor so undeveloped that they are
desperate to do so. Only second-world countries, like
Croatia or Brazil , he speculates, are unfettered enough
to try something new. ''The hope is in the rain forest,''
he says, in countries that ''are more like the United
States was before 1890, when we were a 'pirate' nation.''

And in the United States , is there any future for this
sort of payment system? Perhaps when the various current
schemes fail, Fisher's plan will seem more attractive, he
says. ''What is involved here is nothing less than the
shape of our culture and the way we think of ourselves as
citizens,'' he adds. He describes a recent letter he
received from a supporter of his work. ''When they come
for my guns and my music, they'd better bring an army,''
it read. ''People are used to being creatively engaged
with the culture,'' Fisher explains. ''They won't let
someone legislate that away.''

The future of the Copy Left's efforts is still an open
question. James Boyle has likened the movement's efforts
to establish a cultural commons to those of the
environmental movement in its infancy. Like Rachel Carson
in the years before Earth Day, the Copy Left today is
trying to raise awareness of the intellectual ''land'' to
which they believe we ought to feel entitled and to
propose policies and laws that will preserve it. Just as
the idea of environmentalism became viable in the wake of
the last century's advances in industrial production, the
growth of this century's information technologies, Boyle
argues, will force the country to address the erosion of
the cultural commons. ''The environmentalists helped us to
see the world differently,'' he writes, ''to see that
there was such a thing as 'the environment' rather than
just my pond, your forest, his canal. We need to do the
same thing in the information environment. We have
to 'invent' the public domain before we can save it.''

Robert S. Boynton, director of the graduate magazine
journalism program at New York University, is writing a
book about American literary journalism.

[kurttrail]

wrote:

> The Tyranny of Copyright?
> By ROBERT S. BOYNTON
>
> Last fall, a group of civic-minded students at Swarthmore
> College received a sobering lesson in the future of
> political protest. They had come into possession of some
> 15,000 e-mail messages and memos -- presumably leaked or
> stolen -- from Diebold Election Systems, the largest maker
> of electronic voting machines in the country. The memos
> featured Diebold employees' candid discussion of flaws in
> the company's software and warnings that the computer
> network was poorly protected from hackers. In light of the
> chaotic 2000 presidential election, the Swarthmore
> students decided that this information shouldn't be kept
> from the public. Like aspiring Daniel Ellsbergs with their
> would-be Pentagon Papers, they posted the files on the
> Internet, declaring the act a form of electronic whistle-
> blowing.
>
> Unfortunately for the students, their actions ran afoul of
> the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (D.M.C.A.), one
> of several recent laws that regulate intellectual property
> and are quietly reshaping the culture. Designed to protect
> copyrighted material on the Web, the act makes it possible
> for an Internet service provider to be liable for the
> material posted by its users -- an extraordinary burden
> that providers of phone service, by contrast, do not
> share. Under the law, if an aggrieved party (Diebold, say)
> threatens to sue an Internet service provider over the
> content of a subscriber's Web site, the provider can avoid
> liability simply by removing the offending material. Since
> the mere threat of a lawsuit is usually enough to scare
> most providers into submission, the law effectively gives
> private parties veto power over much of the information
> published online -- as the Swarthmore students would soon
> learn.
>
> Not long after the students posted the memos, Diebold sent
> letters to Swarthmore charging the students with copyright
> infringement and demanding that the material be removed
> from the students' Web page, which was hosted on the
> college's server. Swarthmore complied. The question of
> whether the students were within their rights to post the
> memos was essentially moot: thanks to the Digital
> Millennium Copyright Act, their speech could be silenced
> without the benefit of actual lawsuits, public hearings,
> judges or other niceties of due process.
>
> After persistent challenges by the students -- and a
> considerable amount of negative publicity for Diebold --
> in November the company agreed not to sue. To the delight
> of the students' supporters, the memos are now back on
> their Web site. But to proponents of free speech on the
> Internet, the story remains a chilling one.
>
> Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media scholar at New York
> University , calls anecdotes like this ''copyright horror
> stories,'' and there have been a growing number of them
> over the past few years. Once a dry and seemingly
> mechanical area of the American legal system, intellectual
> property law can now be found at the center of major
> disputes in the arts, sciences and -- as in the Diebold
> case -- politics. Recent cases have involved everything
> from attempts to force the Girl Scouts to pay royalties
> for singing songs around campfires to the infringement
> suit brought by the estate of Margaret Mitchell against
> the publishers of Alice Randall's book ''The Wind Done
> Gone'' (which tells the story of Mitchell's ''Gone With
> the Wind'' from a slave's perspective) to corporations
> like Celera Genomics filing for patents for human genes.
> The most publicized development came in September, when
> the Recording Industry Association of America began suing
> music downloaders for copyright infringement, reaching out-
> of-court settlements for thousands of dollars with
> defendants as young as 12. And in November, a group of
> independent film producers went to court to fight a ban,
> imposed this year by the Motion Picture Association of
> America, on sending DVD's to those who vote for annual
> film awards.
>
> Not long ago, the Internet's ability to provide instant,
> inexpensive and perfect copies of text, sound and images
> was heralded with the phrase ''information wants to be
> free.'' Yet the implications of this freedom have
> frightened some creators -- particularly those in the
> recording, publishing and movie industries -- who argue
> that the greater ease of copying and distribution
> increases the need for more stringent intellectual
> property laws. The movie and music industries have
> succeeded in lobbying lawmakers to allow them to tighten
> their grips on their creations by lengthening copyright
> terms. The law has also extended the scope of copyright
> protection, creating what critics have called
> a ''paracopyright,'' which prohibits not only duplicating
> protected material but in some cases even gaining access
> to it in the first place. In addition to the Digital
> Millennium Copyright Act, the most significant piece of
> new legislation is the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act,
> which added 20 years of protection to past and present
> copyrighted works and was upheld by the Supreme Court a
> year ago. In less than a decade, the much-ballyhooed
> liberating potential of the Internet seems to have given
> way to something of an intellectual land grab, presided
> over by legislators and lawyers for the media industries.
>
> In response to these developments, a protest movement is
> forming, made up of lawyers, scholars and activists who
> fear that bolstering copyright protection in the name of
> foiling ''piracy'' will have disastrous consequences for
> society -- hindering the ability to experiment and create
> and eroding our democratic freedoms. This group of
> reformers, which Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford
> Law School, calls the ''free culture movement,'' might
> also be thought of as the ''Copy Left'' (to borrow a term
> originally used by software programmers to signal that
> their product bore fewer than the usual amount of
> copyright restrictions). Lawyers and professors at the
> nation's top universities and law schools, the members of
> the Copy Left aren't wild-eyed radicals opposed to the use
> of copyright, though they do object fiercely to the way
> copyright has been distorted by recent legislation and
> manipulated by companies like Diebold. Nor do they share a
> coherent political ideology. What they do share is a fear
> that the United States is becoming less free and
> ultimately less creative. While the American copyright
> system was designed to encourage innovation, it is now,
> they contend, being used to squelch it. They see
> themselves as fighting for a traditional understanding of
> intellectual property in the face of a radical effort to
> turn copyright law into a tool for hoarding ideas. ''The
> notion that intellectual property rights should never
> expire, and works never enter the public domain -- this is
> the truly fanatical and unconstitutional position,'' says
> Jonathan Zittrain, a co-founder of the Berkman Center for
> Internet and Society at Harvard Law School , the
> intellectual hub of the Copy Left.
>
> Thinkers like Lessig and Zittrain promote a vision of a
> world in which copyright law gives individual creators the
> exclusive right to profit from their intellectual property
> for a brief, limited period -- thus providing an incentive
> to create while still allowing successive generations of
> creators to draw freely on earlier ideas. They stress that
> borrowing and collaboration are essential components of
> all creation and caution against being seduced by the
> romantic myth of ''the author'': the lone garret-dwelling
> poet, creating masterpieces out of thin air. ''No one
> writes from nothing,'' says Yochai Benkler, a professor at
> Yale Law School . ''We all take the world as it is and use
> it, remix it.''
>
> Where does the Copy Left believe a creation ought to go
> once its copyright has lapsed? Into the public domain, or
> the ''cultural commons'' -- a shared stockpile of ideas
> where the majority of America 's music and literature
> would reside, from which anyone could partake without
> having to pay or ask permission. James Boyle, a professor
> at Duke Law School , notes that the public domain is a
> necessity for social and cultural progress, not some sort
> of socialist luxury. ''Our art, our culture, our science
> depend on this public domain,'' he has written, ''every
> bit as much as they depend on intellectual property.''
>
> In opposition to the cultural commons stands
> the ''permission culture,'' an epithet the Copy Left uses
> to describe the world it fears our current copyright law
> is creating. Whereas you used to own the CD or book you
> purchased, in the permission culture it is more likely
> that you'll lease (or ''license'') a song, video or e-
> book, and even then only under restrictive conditions:
> read your e-book, but don't copy and paste any selections;
> listen to music on your MP3 player, but don't burn it onto
> a CD or transfer it to your stereo. The Copy Left sees
> innovations like iTunes, Apple's popular online music
> store, as the first step toward a society in which much of
> the cultural activity that we currently take for granted --
> reading an encyclopedia in the public library, selling a
> geometry textbook to a friend, copying a song for a
> sibling -- will be rerouted through a system of
> micropayments in return for which the rights to ever
> smaller pieces of our culture are doled out. ''Sooner or
> later,'' predicts Miriam Nisbet, the legislative counsel
> for the American Library Association, ''you'll get to the
> point where you say, 'Well, I guess that 25 cents isn't
> too much to pay for this sentence,' and then there's no
> hope and no going back.''
>
> There is a growing sense of urgency among the members of
> the Copy Left. They worry that if they do not raise
> awareness of what is happening to copyright law, Americans
> will be stuck forever with the consequences of decisions
> now being made -- and laws being passed -- in the name of
> preventing piracy. ''We are at a moment in our history at
> which the terms of freedom and justice are up for grabs,''
> Benkler says. He notes that each major innovation in the
> history of communications -- the printing press, radio,
> telephone -- was followed by a brief period of openness
> before the rules of its usage were determined and
> alternatives eliminated. ''The Internet,'' he says, ''is
> in that space right now.''
>
> America has always had an ambivalent attitude toward the
> notion of intellectual property. Thomas Jefferson, for
> one, considered copyright a necessary evil: he favored
> providing just enough incentive to create, nothing more,
> and thereafter allowing ideas to flow freely as nature
> intended. ''If nature has made any one thing less
> susceptible than all others of exclusive property,'' he
> wrote, ''it is the action of the thinking power called an
> idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long
> as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged,
> it forces itself into the possession of everyone.'' His
> conception of copyright was enshrined in Article 1,
> Section 8 of the Constitution, which gives Congress the
> authority to ''promote the progress of science and useful
> arts, by securing for limited times to authors and
> inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings
> and discoveries.''
>
> But Jefferson 's vision has not fared well. As the
> country's economy developed from agrarian to industrial
> to ''information,'' ideas took on greater importance, and
> the demand increased for stronger copyright laws. In 1790,
> copyright protection lasted for 14 years and could be
> renewed just once before the work entered the public
> domain. Between 1831 and 1909, the maximum term was
> increased from 28 to 56 years. Today, copyright protection
> for individuals lasts for 70 years after the death of the
> author; for corporations, it's 95 years after publication.
> Over the past three decades, the flow of material entering
> the public domain has slowed to a trickle: in 1973,
> according to Lessig, more than 85 percent of copyright
> owners chose not to renew their copyrights, allowing their
> ideas to become common coin; since the 1998 Copyright Term
> Extension Act lengthened present and past copyrights for
> an additional 20 years, little material will enter the
> public domain any time soon.
>
> Some of the changes that expanded copyright protection
> were made with an understanding of their effects; what
> also troubles the Copy Left, however, are the unintended
> consequences of seemingly innocuous tweaks in copyright
> legislation. In particular, two laws that were passed
> years before the creation of the Internet helped set the
> stage for today's copyright bonanza. Before the 1909
> Copyright Act, copyright was construed as the exclusive
> right to ''publish'' a creation; but the 1909 law changed
> the wording to prohibit others from ''copying'' one's
> creation -- a seemingly minor change that thereafter
> linked copyright protection to the copying technology of
> the day, whether that was the pen, the photocopy machine,
> the VCR or the Internet. In 1976, a revision to the law
> dispensed with the requirement of formally registering or
> renewing a copyright in order to comply with international
> copyright standards. Henceforth, everything -- from e-mail
> messages to doodles on a napkin -- was automatically
> copyrighted the moment it was ''fixed in a tangible
> medium.''
>
> The true significance of these two laws didn't become
> apparent until the arrival of the Internet, when every
> work became automatically protected by copyright and every
> use of a work via the Internet constituted a new
> copy. ''Nobody realized that eliminating those
> requirements would create a nightmare of uncertainty and
> confusion about what content is available to use,'' Lessig
> explains, ''which is a crucial question now that the
> Internet is the way we gain access to so much content. It
> was a kind of oil spill in the free culture.''
>
> Lessig is one of the most prominent and eloquent defenders
> of the Copy Left's belief that copyright law should return
> to its Jeffersonian roots. ''We are invoking ideas that
> should be central to the American tradition, such as that
> a free society is richer than a control society,'' he
> says. ''But in the cultural sphere, big media wants to
> build a new Soviet empire where you need permission from
> the central party to do anything.'' He complains that
> Americans have been reduced to ''an Oliver Twist-like
> position,'' in which they have to ask, ''Please, sir, may
> I?'' every time we want to use something under copyright --
> and then only if we are fortunate enough to have the
> assistance of a high-priced lawyer.
>
> In October 2002, Lessig argued before the Supreme Court in
> Eldred v. Ashcroft, which concerned a challenge to the
> Copyright Term Extension Act. On behalf of the plaintiffs,
> Lessig argued that perpetually extending the term of
> copyright was a violation of the Constitution's
> requirement that copyright exist for ''a limited time.''
> The court responded that although perhaps unwise on policy
> grounds, granting such extensions was within Congress's
> power. It was a major setback for the Copy Left. Given the
> Eldred decision, there is nothing to stop a future
> Congress from extending copyright's term again and again.
>
> Lessig's efforts haven't been limited to the courtroom. In
> 2001, he was part of a group that founded an organization
> called Creative Commons, which offers individual creators
> the ability to carefully calibrate the level of control
> they wish to maintain over their works. The organization
> services the needs of, say, musicians who want rappers and
> D.J.'s to be able to download and remix their music
> without legal trouble or of writers who want their works
> republished without charge, but only by nonprofit
> publications. The Commons has developed a software
> application for the Web that allows copyright holders who
> do not want to exercise all of the restrictions of
> copyright law to dedicate their work to the public domain
> or license it on terms that allow copying and creative
> reuses. The aim of Creative Commons is not only to
> increase the sum of raw source material online but also to
> make it cheaper and easier for other creators to locate
> and access that material. This will enable people to use
> the Internet to find, for example, photographs that are
> free to be altered or reused or texts that may be copied,
> distributed or sampled -- all by their authors'
> permission. The Creative Commons now has a presence in 10
> countries, including Brazil , whose minister of culture,
> the musician Gilberto Gil, plans to release some of his
> songs under the Creative Commons license so that others
> may freely borrow from them. Creative Commons is currently
> talking to Amazon and others about a plan to release out-
> of-print books under Creative Commons licenses.
>
> One of the central ideas of the Copy Left is that the
> Internet has been a catalyst for re-engaging with the
> culture -- for interacting with the things we read and
> watch and listen to, as opposed to just sitting back and
> absorbing them. This vision of how culture works stands in
> contrast to what the Copy Left calls the ''broadcast
> model'' -- the arrangement in which a small group of
> content producers disseminate their creations (television,
> movies, music) through controlled routes (cable, theaters,
> radio-TV stations) to passive consumers. Yochai Benkler,
> the law professor at Yale, argues that people want to be
> more engaged in their culture, despite the broadcast
> technology, like television, that he says has narcotized
> us. ''People are users,'' he says. ''They are producers,
> storytellers, consumers, interactors -- complex, varied
> beings, not just people who go to the store, buy a
> packaged good off the shelf and consume.''
>
> A few weeks ago, I met Benkler in his loft in downtown New
> York . He stroked his beard while explicating his ideas
> with the care of a man parsing a particularly knotty
> question of Scripture. Benkler was born in Tel Aviv in
> 1964, and while in his 20's, he helped found a remote
> desert kibbutz in an attempt to recapture the Zionist
> movement's original socialist spirit. The challenges of
> creating a community in isolation from the rest of society
> ultimately proved overwhelming. ''After a few years,'' he
> said, ''we realized that at the rate we were going we
> wouldn't attend college until we were in our 50's.'' It
> was a hard lesson in the difficulty of producing anything -
> - a community, a work of art -- in isolation.
>
> But Benkler's belief in the importance of creating things
> in common rests on more than anecdotal evidence. What
> makes his argument more than wishful thinking, he said, is
> that he has some economic evidence for his view. ''Let's
> compare a few numbers,'' he said. ''How much do people pay
> the recording industry to listen to music versus how much
> people pay the telephone industry to talk to their friends
> and family? The recording industry is a $12 billion a year
> business, compared with the telephone business, which is a
> more than $250 billion a year business. That is what
> economists call a 'revealed willingness to pay,' a clear
> preference for a technology that allows you to participate
> in work, socializing and interaction in general, over a
> technology that allows you to be a passive consumer of a
> packaged good. Is that a study of human nature? No. Is it
> an economic measure that would suggest there is a lot of
> demand out there for speaking and listening to others?
> Yes.''
>
> According to Benkler, the cultural commons not only offers
> a better model for creativity; it makes good economic
> sense. Like Lessig and other members of the Copy Left, he
> takes his bearings from the free software movement and
> views the success of products like Linux and services like
> Google as evidence of a viable collaborative (or ''peer to
> peer'') model for producing and sharing ideas -- a model
> that will augment and, in some cases, replace the current
> model. (He concedes that some products, like novels and
> blockbuster movies, will never be produced peer to peer,
> though they will draw on the work of artists before them.)
>
> Benkler predicts that the recording industry will be one
> of the first businesses to go. ''All it does is package
> and sell goods,'' he said, ''which is technically an
> unfeasible way of continuing. They are trying their best
> to legislate the environment to change, but that doesn't
> mean we have to let them.''
>
> The battle between the Copy Left and its opponents is as
> much a clash of worldviews as of legal doctrine. Aligned
> against the Copy Left are those who sympathize with the
> romantic notion of authorship and view the culture as a
> market in which everything of value should be owned by
> someone or other. Jane Ginsburg, a professor at Columbia
> Law School who specializes in copyright law, fears that in
> the Copy Left's rush to secure the public domain, it gives
> short shrift to the author. A self-described ''copyright
> enthusiast,'' Ginsburg considers the author the moral
> center of copyright law and questions equating copyright
> control with corporate greed. ''Copyright cannot be
> understood merely as a grudgingly tolerated way station on
> the road to the public domain,'' she writes in a recent
> article titled ''The Concept of Authorship in Comparative
> Copyright Law.'' ''Because copyright arises out of the act
> of creating a work, authors have moral claims that neither
> corporate intermediaries nor consumer end-users can
> (straightfacedly) assert.''
>
> Ginsburg and others embrace many elements of
> the ''permission society'' demonized by the Copy Left and
> cite developments like the iTunes store as a sign of
> greater consumer choice and freedom. In his
> book ''Copyright's Highway,'' Paul Goldstein, a professor
> at Stanford Law School , writes that ''the logic of
> property rights dictates their extension into every corner
> in which people derive enjoyment and value from literary
> and artistic works.'' He characterizes the permission
> society as a ''celestial jukebox'' in which access to
> every creation -- music, literature, movies, art -- is
> available to anyone for a price.
>
> An entire ''digital rights management'' industry has
> arisen to bring this vision to fruition, each company
> calibrating a particular license through a system of
> micropayments -- play a song on your computer for one
> price; transfer it to your MP3 player for a slightly
> higher fee. Goldstein argues that the scheme of a business
> like iTunes is actually more efficient and democratic than
> the commons model championed by the Copy Left. ''The
> problem with the commons is that it doesn't take into
> consideration the direction of the payment; it doesn't
> reveal what kind of culture gets used and what kind
> doesn't,'' he says. ''I think it is good to have a price
> tag attached to each use because it tells producers what
> consumers want; it lets them vote with their purchase for
> the kinds of culture they want.''
>
> But the Copy Left is convinced that there is a better way
> for the entertainment industry to adapt to the Internet
> age while still paying its artists their due. William
> Fisher, director of the Berkman Center , has spent the
> last three years devising an alternative compensation
> system that would enable the entertainment industry to
> restructure its business model without resorting to
> cumbersome micropayments. He has worked out a modified
> version of the system that artists' advocacy groups
> currently use to make sure that composers are paid when
> their music is performed or recorded. According to
> Fisher's plan, all works capable of being transmitted
> online would be registered with a central office (whether
> government or independent is unclear). The central office
> would then monitor how frequently a work is used and
> compensate the creators on that basis. The money would
> come from a tax on various content-related devices, like
> DVD burners, blank CD's or digital recorders. It is a
> brave proposal in a political culture that is allergic to
> taxes and uncomfortable with complex solutions. Still, if
> his numbers do indeed add up, Fisher's proposal might be
> the best thing that ever happened to the cultural commons:
> the creators would be paid, while every individual would
> have unlimited access to every cultural creation.
>
> Fisher and Charles Nesson, his colleague at Harvard Law
> School , have showed this proposal to movie executives and
> lawyers for several media conglomerates. Fisher says that
> his ideas have been received with great interest by the
> very industries -- music, home video -- that see their
> business models disintegrating before their eyes.
>
> When asked whether he thinks his ambitious scheme has a
> chance, Fisher says that the likeliest possibility would
> be for it to be adopted in countries that are neither so
> developed that they have signed on to international
> copyright protocols nor so undeveloped that they are
> desperate to do so. Only second-world countries, like
> Croatia or Brazil , he speculates, are unfettered enough
> to try something new. ''The hope is in the rain forest,''
> he says, in countries that ''are more like the United
> States was before 1890, when we were a 'pirate' nation.''
>
> And in the United States , is there any future for this
> sort of payment system? Perhaps when the various current
> schemes fail, Fisher's plan will seem more attractive, he
> says. ''What is involved here is nothing less than the
> shape of our culture and the way we think of ourselves as
> citizens,'' he adds. He describes a recent letter he
> received from a supporter of his work. ''When they come
> for my guns and my music, they'd better bring an army,''
> it read. ''People are used to being creatively engaged
> with the culture,'' Fisher explains. ''They won't let
> someone legislate that away.''
>
> The future of the Copy Left's efforts is still an open
> question. James Boyle has likened the movement's efforts
> to establish a cultural commons to those of the
> environmental movement in its infancy. Like Rachel Carson
> in the years before Earth Day, the Copy Left today is
> trying to raise awareness of the intellectual ''land'' to
> which they believe we ought to feel entitled and to
> propose policies and laws that will preserve it. Just as
> the idea of environmentalism became viable in the wake of
> the last century's advances in industrial production, the
> growth of this century's information technologies, Boyle
> argues, will force the country to address the erosion of
> the cultural commons. ''The environmentalists helped us to
> see the world differently,'' he writes, ''to see that
> there was such a thing as 'the environment' rather than
> just my pond, your forest, his canal. We need to do the
> same thing in the information environment. We have
> to 'invent' the public domain before we can save it.''
>
> Robert S. Boynton, director of the graduate magazine
> journalism program at New York University, is writing a
> book about American literary journalism.

I guess that MS is only concern with protecting their own copyrights, and
not those of others!

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

--
Peace!
Kurt
Self-anointed Moderator
microscum.pubic.windowsexp.gonorrhea
http://microscum.com
"Trustworthy Computing" is only another example of an Oxymoron!
"Produkt-Aktivierung macht frei!"