Although I’m still focussed on 1p2U.com, some time later this year I hope to set up the website culturalliberty.org – a site dedicated to the restoration of everyone’s cultural liberty, especially from its constraint by anachronistic privileges such as copyright and patent (which should have been abolished along with slavery).
There’ll be a wiki upon which I hope ethical law can be developed (for legislative protection of all individuals’ natural rights concerning the possession, production and communication of information and intellectual works).
So, in getting started, I thought I’d sketch out some definitions, i.e. without explanations or examples (which can come later). Suffice it to say, these definitions will be tweaked.
Definitions
Individuals are human beings, a priori equal.
Human Rights, the rights of all individuals, are naturally: life, privacy, truth, liberty.
Right always and exclusively refers to right in the natural sense, implicitly qualified as natural right.
Life is the naturally optimal functioning of an individual human being, the preservation of its health and integrity, the necessary maintenance and protection of its body’s boundaries, sustenance and environment, and the perpetuation of its operating period.
Privacy describes the individual’s natural ability to exclude others from particular objects, information, and spaces that they possess, occupy, or are otherwise able to physically defend or secure. Privacy may be enjoyed jointly as well as singly.
The right to Truth is against interference with, or impairment of, anyone’s natural ability to perceive, pursue or apprehend it, e.g. against fraud or misrepresentation.
Liberty includes an individual’s freedom of movement, speech, or senses, in their natural habitat among their fellows, and entails that these freedoms remain without physical constraint – until the individual has been found in violation of anyone’s rights, and only then to the least extent possible and necessary for their rehabilitation and the protection of others’ rights.
Freedom is the natural, unconstrained condition of the individual, i.e. one not subject to government. It is delimited by all individuals’ natural power and interest to protect their natural rights – who may collectively empower a government.
Rights are inalienable. That means the individual cannot be parted from them, neither by themselves nor by their government.
Rights take precedence: Privacy must cede to Life (invasion may be warranted in the protection of life). Truth must cede to Privacy (the public’s interest does not outweigh the individual’s interest in excluding it). Liberty must cede to Truth (where its impairment through deceit or fraud risks harm or social disharmony). In this way each right delimits the next, and all rights delimit freedom.
Rights are imbued by nature in all individuals equally. They are not conditional, e.g. on gender, skin colour, religion, payment of taxes, nor good behaviour. If rights are not protected for the pariahs of society they are not protected for the paragons. If a government exempts terrorists from its protection it terrorises its own citizens as a consequence.
A harmonious society is epiphenomenal. It is that which results when a government carefully protects the rights of the citizens that empower it. Their protection is primary – not secondary to protection of society nor to the existence of the government they create, and thus rights should not be derogated in pursuit of social harmony, benefit to society, ‘the encouragement of learning’, ‘progress’, ‘the common good’, nor upon a wish by the people to engage in a ‘social contract’ to surrender, waive or relax their rights to that end, whether in whole or part.
Privileges (legislatively enacted analogues of rights) are always referred to as ‘privileges’, not as some call them: ‘legally granted rights’, ‘legal rights’ or simply ‘rights’. Privileges are instruments of injustice and not to be found in an egalitarian society nor any legislature primarily concerned with the protection of individuals’ natural rights.
A Contract is an equitable agreement (voluntary) between two individuals concerning the conditioned exchange of their property, whether material or intellectual. A contract cannot surrender, abrogate, nor derogate from any individual’s rights – it is not a promise (as would alienate liberty). A government has no power to enforce completion nor penalise incompletion, only to arbitrate in any dispute as to equity or agreeability, and to mandate a remedy to that end as far as is practicable.
A government is created and continuously empowered by its individual citizens, and those individuals are the only source of its power, which may be removed or redirected by them.
A government may be empowered to collect taxes to provide and care for its citizens’ common interest: the protection of their rights, their safety, health, and social well being, e.g. policing, defence, energy, utilities, transport, and communications infrastructure, healthcare, education, environment, etc.
Corporations or any other legally created entity are not individuals nor even comparable let alone equivalent, and being unnatural are not imbued with rights. All such entities should be regulated to ensure their activities and motives are aligned with the common good, i.e. not simply maximisation of share value.
News International retreats from the public, disagreeing with the idea that mere readers should be allowed, let alone encouraged to freely read and quote from newspapers, e.g. as I do now from “The Times paywall: An end to sharing” by Rory Cellan-Jones.
A great experiment is about to get under way, and it will tell us much about the future of journalism and the willingness of readers to pay for it. In Wapping last night, News International showed off the new websites for The Times and Sunday Times which have opened to the public this morning. Four weeks from now, a paywall will go up in front of the sites and, by News international’s own calculation, more than 90% of their audience will melt away.
This is of course nothing to do with readers’ willingness to pay journalists for their journalism, but the ability for newspapers to charge each reader for reading it, and prevent anyone who hasn’t paid from doing so. When you can’t sell copies, then selling access seems very similar – if you think like a newspaper, that is.
Rory later reveals:
I asked Danny Finkelstein whether it bothered him that from now on none of his journalism would “go viral”, with the risk that he’d be left invisible on the sidelines as the online debate raged through news sites without paywalls. “No,” he insisted,“I want my employer to be paid for my intellectual property.”
That is Stockholm Syndrome. I would think most journalists care more about being paid for their intellectual work than enabling their employers to charge readers for copies of it at monopoly protected prices – and failing that, to charge readers for access.
If news can be freely distributed to the public, the only thing left to pay for is the journalism – and the readers who want more can pay the journalists directly – to write.
Unlike many, Bill Rosenblatt has graciously tolerated my engagement with him in a conversation concerning copyright. At the time of writing, his and my comments still appear beneath his Copyright and Technology blog article entitled “William Patry’s War on Copyright”.
A vendor selling a copy or imitation that is misrepresented as the genuine article is committing a falsehood, a deceit. This has been recognised as something that should be prohibited since time immemorial.
However, a vendor selling a copy or imitation that is honestly represented as a copy, derivative, or imitation of another work is committing no falsehood or deceit. This has also been recognised as something perfectly natural and to be embraced since time immemorial. Man has progressed precisely through a process of sharing knowledge, copying songs, stories, tools and techniques and improving them.
The unnatural law that was introduced in 1710 by Queen Anne was the privilege of a reproduction monopoly granted to printers of literary works, and this at a stroke suspended the public’s right to make copies – a natural right that they had enjoyed as part of their natural liberty since time immemorial.
So, what happens when the public find themselves in possession of ever more powerful reproduction technology?
The people are in fundamental conflict with those in possession of the privilege that suspends their liberty.
To say, because the 18th century privilege is still law three centuries later, that it is therefore the law that is right and the people who are in the wrong is to blind yourself to the reality of the conflict, to refuse to recognise the nature of people and information.
The Digital Economy Bill is simply yet another attempt to provide the privileged with additional legal sanctions, to effectively give King Canute yet more extreme powers to hold back the incorrigibly disobedient tide.
The Internet is essentially a system for instantaneously diffusing (distributing & reproducing) digital, intellectual works. A transferable 18th century privilege that requires that no-one distributes or reproduces an intellectual work without permission from the holder of that privilege is at best an anachronism, and at worst an unethical statute that should never have been enacted.
This writing is on the wall. If you hesitate to copy it and freely distribute it among your peers you are not dutifully respecting the privilege and law that suspends your liberty to do so, but committing yourself into ignorance and cultural suicide.
The unnatural law that was introduced in 1710 by Queen Anne was the privilege of a reproduction monopoly granted to printers of literary works, and this at a stroke suspended the public’s right to make copies – a natural right that they had enjoyed as part of their natural liberty since time immemorial.
Are you sure? I believe that the law was actually a considerable liberalization, in that prior to its passage, the freedom to print anything was strictly limited to royally chartered guilds, the output of which was subject to review by the Church.
In other words, even authors didn’t have the right to print their own works. The act of printing itself was monopolized.
In 1709/10, this changed. The right to print (not copy, mind you, but to simply print) was vested in authors, who could subsequently name their own terms when negotiation with the guilds – which were barred from printing new material (i.e. less than 14 years old) without the author’s permission.
I don’t think this changes the thrust of you argument, but it’s important to understand how the law evolved of you want to see in continue its slow but ancient trajectory towards freedom.
Yes, prior to the Statute of Anne, there were de facto monopolies, and various edicts either permitting or constraining printing (and not just in England). However, 1710 marks the point at which the suspension of the individual’s right to copy published works was permanently established, the final nail hammered in, reserving such copying as the transferable privilege of a copyright holder.
I do not intend to imply that prior to 1710 people were blissfully engaging in free cultural intercourse. Far from it.
Everyone should read up on the history of copyright and all that precedes it to make up their own mind as to whether we are on a trajectory toward freedom or away from it.
Um, I think there may be another historical error here – specifically, your suggestion that copyrights were transferable beginning in 1710.
In fact, copyrights were not considered property – at least at the outset. They did not acquire property’s defining characteristic (legally transferable title) until the latter half of the 19th century. This development followed a century of cultural and economic development in which the publishing trade became enormously powerful. Only at this point did the notion of privilege as a function of property value become a matter of serious commercial consideration.
After all, copyright (really, print-right) was initially a mechanism for censorship. It was exercised by the church and crown, and existed not to govern the flow of commerce, but the flow of ideas themselves. Only after this restriction was relaxed could the commercial side of printing really take off. And again, it took more than a century before it was developed enough to demand its own modification to the law (specifically, the transformation of author’s rights into property rights).
Alex, this is not really the place to argue the minutiae of copyright’s complex history. My point remains that copyright IS a transferable privilege and was ESTABLISHED by the Statute of Anne in the 18th century. It is not inaccurate to describe it as a transferable 18th century privilege.
That various aspects of copyright have changed over the years doesn’t change that essential point. One can also quibble over the nuances and meaning of assignable vs transferable, that the latter term may not have appeared until later acts, but I don’t see that linguistic distinction as important as the one between right qua privilege (legally granted right) and right qua right (natural right).
When you say ‘another historical error’, what was the other one? Do you still dispute the accuracy of the first passage of mine that you quoted?
Here’s a more expansive description of copyright as enacted by the Statute of Anne – I embolden the part about assignablility, that it was not usually the authors who remained holders of the privilege:
During the course of the seventeenth century, copyright became intertwined with politics and censorship. The Company of Stationers, which received its legitimacy from a royal charter, rode through the turmoil of the civil war and restitution of the crown, but the previous arrangements to bring order to the trade slowly changed into arrangements to control the press. The Licensing Act that governed the book trade expired in 1692 and the House of Commons refused to renew it. There were many reasons, but one of them was the belief that the Stationers had abused their monopoly.
Chaos ensued. The book trade went from a tightly regulated enterprise to a wide-open free-for-all. The stationers petitioned Parliament for relief, and it finally came in 1709 with the Statute of Anne. The outcome wasn’t exactly what the stationers wanted.
The Statute of Anne was an attempt to restore order to the book trade and, at the same time, to address perceived abuses by the stationers. It provided two kinds of copyright. For past works, it extended the stationer’s copyright for a period of 21 years. For future works, it gave the author (or any assignee!) the exclusive right to print the work for 14 years, with the stipulation that the right could be extended by an author for another 14 years. There are two important points here. First, the statute allowed people outside the Stationer’s Company to hold the copyright (although it was the assignees rather than the authors who normally held it). Second, the statute attempted to break the monopoly of the stationers by limiting the term of copyright — a radical change for the stationers, who until then had enjoyed perpetual copyright.
Really enjoyed Ewing’s essay – thanks for the link.
However, I’m still surprised to see you glossing over what seem (to me at least) to be important details. After all, one of the things I’ve always admired about you is your unwillingness to be anything less than absolutely precise. Your systematic differentiation between rights and privileges is a case in point, and an prime example of the clarity that is so conspicuously absent from most copyright discussions.
That’s why I find your equation between assigning rights (sorry, privileges), and selling them outright to be so remarkable. Put simply, these are not the same. A rough analogy can be made in the difference between renting an apartment and buying one. Sure, you can say the apartment you rent is ‘your’ home, but of course, it isn’t really. Same thing goes for a publisher that has simply been assigned a publication right. Even if the assignment is perpetual, this arrangement can still introduce important limits (equivalent to rules against sub-leasing) that dramatically limit a publisher’s capacity to exploit the work.
From their perspective, this is an enormous difference. It may not be apparent to the author, who sees no practical difference between having to assign his copyright and sell it, especially when both transactions come with equivalent terms and result in the same thing (publisher places a bet by risking the costs of distribution / author gets paid something in the process).
However, when you consider what happens on the other side of the table, you’ll find that the ability to formally own, stockpile, combine, and resell these privileges leads to dramatic changes in their behavior of publishing enterprises (to say nothing of their commercial prospects). This shift is especially pronounced when you move beyond books, images, compositions, and other forms of expression that generally stem from solitary authors, and consider expressive forms that are born from collaboration, such as encyclopedias, films, symphonic recordings, mass media broadcasts, and grand architectural plans.
So again, there’s a vital difference between psudeo-property rights (such as the ability to assign, introduced in 1709), and the ability to flat-out sell, which didn’t come into play until England’s Copyright Act 1842 declared that copyrights were personal property in the fullest sense, and thus (and for the first time) capable of bequest. This significant development didn’t ‘go global’ until 1889, when the Berne Convention harmonized the different copyright laws maintained by its signatories so that they all included this definition of copyright as fully transferable property – nearly 200 years after the Statute of Anne.
On a separate note, while I enjoyed Ewing’s essay, I’m worried that his perspective may suffer from being too narrow, leading to a less nuanced view than the circumstances demand. For instance, while he may be correct to note that the Statue of Anne was not passed due to an abiding concern with author’s well being, it did reflect a (well-placed) concern that the unrestricted power of the Stationers had risen to the level of a national security threat. Ewing made no mention of this larger concern and I think his argument suffers for it.
In truth, matters were far less one-sided. After all, by this point the practical value of the scientific revolution had becoming abundantly clear – particularly with regard to astronomy, navigation, and the resulting conquest, accumulation of wealth, and ability to employ armies.
Even if the Crown didn’t care about individual authors, they recognized that a culture hostile to free inquiry and the liberal circulation of ideas would align them with historic enemies like Spain and Portugal (both in serious decline) and at a disadvantage in relation to powers like France and Holland (both ascendent, scientifically savvy, leery of domination by clerics, with the latter home of the Dutch East India Company).
So yes, the Stationers may have clung to some of their power through all-too-familiar means to do so (“pity the artist!”). And yes, we’re still living with some of the myths they managed to invent. But on the other side of the coin, they were fighting a losing battle against a new kind of progress (scientific) which has also continued unabated, and which, 300 years later, is having the last laugh by decoupling matter and media for good.
It’s a total shitshow, as you recognize better than most. And there’s a lot of deliberate obfuscation as a result – which is why I think it’s unwise to gloss over the exact legal meaning of some of the debate’s most central terms. If the object of the game is to disentangle the myths that persist, then it seem important to note that copyright as property – and not simply assignable privilege – is a 19th Century invention.
Alex, I’m not trying to belittle the difference between assignability and transferability per se. I’m only saying that quibbling about it may be interesting, but it does not invalidate my original article.
I made no claim regarding this aspect of copyright in the original article. It may well be an interesting historical detail, and I encourage readers to read up the history for such details.
You appear to be suggesting that I’ve made two historical errors. I don’t see that I’ve made any, but you may yet convince me otherwise.
Omitting what you regard as essential historical points may be an editorial shortcoming in your view, but I don’t believe this constitutes historical error on my part.
Do you disagree with any of the following:
1) 1709 is the last year in which the individual’s natural right to make copies of published works remains underogated by legislation.
2) Copyright is a privilege enacted in the 18th century, and therefore can be described as an 18th century privilege.
3) Copyright is a transferable privilege and therefore can be described as a transferable 18th century privilege.
My use of ‘transferable’ is not to focus on the precise manner in which copyright is transferable or can be treated as a legal property, nor to imply that no legislative changes have occurred in its transferability/assignability since 1709.
I’m using ‘transferable’ to add weight to my point that natural rights are inalienable whereas privileges aren’t.
The inalienability of a natural right is a matter of natural law, not legislation. Legislation may stipulate that the holder of a privilege may neither assign nor transfer their privilege (as with droit de suite), but that doesn’t make the privilege an inalienable natural right.
I disagree with all three points, though with some moreso than others.
More importantly, I see the general thrust of this argument – that the 1709 law represented a sudden and sweeping suspension of liberty – as very unsound. Far from being the regressive act that this framing suggests, I see it as a fundamentally liberal proposition, and one that paved the way for greater liberalization – even as it introduced elements that grew into barriers to that larger trend.
When it comes to successfully framing present-day issues (i.e. to do so in a way that persuades more people of copyright’s illiberality), it seems to be critically important that the larger trend be represented correctly.
In response to your specific points, consider the following.
1) When saying “1709 is the last year in which the individual’s natural right to make copies of published works remains underogated by legislation.” You make no distinction between mechanical and non-mechanical copies.
With regard to non-mechanical copies (i.e. transcriptions by hand) I don’t believe the law said anything one way or the other. After all, the process is so labor intensive as to be irrelevant to the act of publishing in any conventional sense of the word.
And with regard to printed copies, the public’s right had been well and truly derogated long before 1709. That was the whole point of the printing guilds – not simply to extend monopoly powers over specific works, but to monopolize the very act of printing. That is to say, prior to 1709, it was illegal to simply own or operate a free press. Moreover, the law that was superseded in 1709 gave specific authority to members of the Stationers guild to hunt down and destroy presses that were not owned and operated by the guild. To suggest that this environment was one in which “individual’s natural right to make copies” was respected is – frankly, absurd. How can a person be ‘free’ to do something when possessing the means of doing that thing is a crime? That’s like saying you’re free to write what you like – just don’t make any use paper, pencil, or ink.
Of course, the ability of anyone to operate a press – even to publish the King James Bible – was, itself, a major liberalization. Prior to the Reformation, vernacular copies of the Bible had been outlawed, as had – at one point – the freedom to even read the Bible. Forget about physically copying (an inconceivable liberty) – simply going to existing sources to create a direct mental impression instead of relying on the interpretations of clergy was considered a no-go.
So sure, the ‘right’ to copy may have existed (indeed, it did, and was well exercised in any number of matters, from agriculture to military strategies). However, like any other human right now widely accepted today, it wasn’t recognized by the prevailing authorities – at least not with regard to printed materials. Indeed, the right to copy anything may not have been regarded as a right at all, and was instead considered (if considered at all) as something reflexive, like the ‘right’ to eat, sleep, or breathe. And again, acceptance of this reflexive freedom had never been extended to books.
So with regard to point 2, no – copyright – in the absolute sense – was not enacted in the 18th Century. Yes, the first example of a law that reflects aspects of our own may have been introduced in the 18th Century (which is why this is called the first modern copyright law), but copyright taken literally – which is to say, the right to make literary copies – was firmly restricted long before 1709.
The importance of the 1709 law (in my view, at least) is that it separated the act of making copies in general from the act of making particular copies. By severely limiting the power of the state to limit the production of copies in general, the market for the making of copies expanded dramatically. The fact that more individuals took advantage of the law’s monopoly protection did not mean that the scope of copyright law changed dramatically. After all, it only applied to books (which has always been subject to limitations) and it only applied for 14 years (a major reduction from the perpetual monopolies that existed prior t 1709).
What we now see at the major expansions didn’t take place until the next century, when the duration of the law’s protection was amplified, along with the number of expressive forms that it covered.
Your larger point, that no true right is transferable – is well taken. Once you adopt the basic view that the rights of man are intrinsic and inalienable, you understand that the definition of a right is something that cannot be granted by law – period. It can simply be recognized and protected. Obviously, something transferable fails this test immediately.
What I find interesting is that the original 1709 law was closer to this original sense of right, as opposed to its more modern incarnation as a simple privilege. Throughout the 18th Century, hiring a printer seems to have been more like hiring an accountant or a lawyer. That it to say, they were authorized to exercise your rights on your behalf, but at no point were they allowed to operate independently, or contrary to your interests.
But once copyright became fully transferable (as opposed to merely assignable), this limited relation between author and agent evaporated. Once a right has been given title and sold off, the author had no further claim whatsoever, and the owner of the right had no obligation outside of the agreement to pay. Of course, some countries accepted the idea of the author’s moral right – allowing them to renounce any work that was altered insufferably – but that didn’t become a universal convention. And again – all this happened in the 19th Century. Even if the seeds of this development were planted a century prior, I think it’s misleading to suggest that they attained their present form immediately, or that the authors of this law actively condoned an interpretation of their act that did not, in fact, develop for another 140 years.
So put simply, Queen Anne predated the idea of copyright as titled and fully transferable property by a long time. While the development of copyright as property may represent a fundamental injustice, it’s unfair to lay it at the feet of people who were dead well before its introduction.
The most important point of all is that recognizing the public’s right to copy is actually a very new development. Because is has – for economic reasons – been considered a privileged (in that very few were privileged enough to afford a press), we’ve not considered whether the act itself is a fundamental right.
Returning – again – to the notion of rights as intrinsic qualities of being human that can’t be granted by law, and can only be recognized by law, it’s only now – when the means to copy and distribute have become so advanced that these acts seem like walking or breathing – do we finally start to consider that, perhaps, we’ve been wrong to ever think of them as privileges. Only now is it dawning on many people that this has always been a fundamental right. For those who measure the progress of history by the extent to which governments first recognize, then accept, and finally protect these rights, the ability to use the internet in the most natural fashion becomes the vanguard of legal development.
My suspicion is that this is truly uncharted territory. Even if the 1709 law did establish the trajectory of current thinking, its grant of privileged hardly overturned a robust and well-established concept of right. To the contrary, recognition of the natural right to copy literary works was so anemic that only now – 300 years later – is is even beginning to be discussed seriously.
To that end, I think the most important step is the reflexive framing of copyright law as a matter of privilege, and not a true right – which cannot be transferred, and can only be limited in response to a specific criminal charge, and the due process of trial in an open court.
You make many good points Alex, and I would have been more disposed to discuss them had they not been made in support of your claims of two historical errors on my part (of which I remain unconvinced).
I continue to see the three points I posed in my previous comment as correct. That you cannot agree with them helps explain your position that I have made historical errors.
Anyway, here’s another recent post you may be interested in concerning the Statute of Anne and the significance of 1709/10 in copyright’s history: Blawg Review #258
“Obviously the Statute of Anne, having been put in force 300 years ago, almost to this day, is no longer good law in any jurisdiction. In fact, almost immediately after it was enacted it began to be transformed. But it stands as a turning point in the history of English law-based systems by being the first true instance of copyright law as we’ve come to know it.”
Free software engineers have been one of the largest sectors (in the industry of intellectual work) to grok the iniquity of the 18th century privileges of copyright and patent a few decades ago (and contrive a partial remedy), but every day more and more geeks are ‘getting it’. More and more people are realising that something is rotten in the state of Denmark, realising that an unnatural monopoly that criminalises the cultural and technological exchange that has come naturally to people for aeons, indeed has been critical for mankind’s cultural and technological development, cannot be as good as people have been brought up to believe.
Here’s a recent “Copyright is our liberty!” qua ‘Soylent Green is People!’ revelation from a commenter on Slashdot (Hat tip p2pnet):
I’ve posted most of this before on slashdot; This is just a cleanup of previous posts — it has details of why the ACTA is secret.
A Private War
I used to read stuff like this and get upset. But then I realized that my entire generation knows it’s baloney. They can’t explain it intellectually. They have no real understanding of the subtleties of the law, or arguments about artists’ rights or any of that. All they really understand is there is are large corporations charging private citizens tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, for downloading a few songs here and there. And it’s intuitively obvious that it can’t possibly be worth that.
An entire generation has disregarded copyright law. It doesn’t matter whether copyright is useful or not anymore. They could release attack dogs and black helicopters and it wouldn’t really change people’s attitudes. It won’t matter how many websites they shut down or how many lives they ruin, they’ve already lost the culture war because they pushed too hard and alienated people wholesale. The only thing these corporations can do now is shift the costs to the government and other corporations under color of law in a desperate bid for relevance. And that’s exactly what they’re doing.
What does this mean for the average person? It means that we google and float around to an ever-changing landscape of sites. We communicate by word of mouth via e-mail, instant messaging, and social networking sites where the latest fix of free movies, music, and games are. If you don’t make enough money to participate in the artificial marketplace of entertainment goods — you don’t exclude yourself from it, you go to the grey market instead. All the technological, legal, and philosophical barriers in the world amount to nothing. There is a small core of people that understand the implications of what these interests are doing and continually search for ways to liberate their goods and services for “sale” on the grey market. It is (economically and politically) identical to the Prohibition except that instead of smuggling liquor we are smuggling digital files.
Billions have been spent combating a singularily simple idea that was spawned thirty years ago by a bunch of socially-inept disaffected teenagers working out of their garages: Information wants to be free. Except information has no wants — it’s the people who want to be free. And while we can change attitudes about smoking with aggressive media campaigns, or convince them to cast their votes for a certain candidate, selling people on goods and services they don’t really need, what we cannot change is the foundations upon which a generation has built a new society out of.
Culture Connection
Just as we have physical connections to each other, we now have digital connections to one another. These connections actively resist attempts at control because it impedes the development and nature of the relationships we have with one another. People naturally seek the methods which give them the greatest freedom to express themselves to each other. That is a force of nature (ours, specifically) that has evolved out of our interconnectedness. Copyright law has been twisted to serve as a bulwark against the logical result of increasing social interconnectedness between people and computers: Access an ever-increasing amount of humanity’s history, knowledge, and culture. Ultimately, this is a battle they cannot win — they can only delay, building dams and locks to stem the tide, but they will fail. It’s how, when, and where it fails that will decide the fate of economies worldwide.
Every law advantages one group while disadvantaging another. And every engine, be it physical or social, functions because an energy imbalance exists and by moving energy from one potential to another, we can skim some off to do useful work. Laws work the same way — by creating artificial differences between groups of people, society produces goods and services. This is why we will always have new Prohibitions. It’s not a comfortable or politically correct thing to admit, that for societies to function there must necessarily be inequality between people. It is nonetheless true.
This is not a reason to give up hope or be cynical! We are in the middle of a social revolution that has few outward signs. Unlike generations past, the revolution that is happening now exists in fragmentary communications by a collectivistic movement that lacks any real core. It has been created by an unspoken understanding between its participants. That is to say, the participants of the digital community to varying degrees develop the same coping mechanisms to frame their understanding of this environment. These coping mechanisms develop into ideas and beliefs that we then form the basis of our interactions with other members. Put another way, these coping strategies that we interpose between ourselves and our environment form the basis of culture. The interesting part is, this change occurred without any indoctrination or central leadership to accomplish. Mere exposure to the environment alone seems to predispose people to a certain kind of thinking that cuts across barriers of country, culture, sex, and race.
There are no real leaders for the digital culture, yet the culture is there. This is unprecidented. There are very, very few social movements that organize around principals instead of individuals who exemplify those ideals. Whether you live in Iran or America, Africa or Europe, the same values systems are spontaniously developing in reaction to exposure to the digital environment. And while the state of the art has advanced at an incredible rate, our methods of understanding and interacting within the new social spaces created by that aren’t changing that much. It’s a stable environment evolving at rate sufficiently slow to allow culture to form.
That, in and of itself, is amazing. Forget copyright for a moment and consider all the other social advances that are taking place because of our digital interconnectedness — and then realize that there are only a very few friction points in this revolution! That is also unprecidented in modern history.
The Bubble
Copyright won’t end anytime soon, but I’m suggesting we look at the fundamentals here: it is an artificial construct within the digital environment. It’s something we built extraneous to it, and in fact is antagonistic to it. The exchange of information is fundamental to the existance of the internet. Copyright is not. Copyright is an institution, like marriage, the church, the government, etc. Like those things, it has a maintenance cost. It is a coping mechanism. That’s not a judgement on its sustainability nor its justification for existance (or lack thereof).
Copyright is an institution and like all social institutions remain in existance only for as long as its members continue to support it. There is a substantial and growing number of digital identities (people, organizations, projects, etc.) that exist outside of that institution. Why? Because information is very, very cheap to replicate. Production of that information however can vary in cost. Everybody agrees that there must be some compensatory mechanism, however artificial, to reimburse people for the effort invested in the production of the goods and services that copyright protects. If there is no protection at all, many staples of modern life cease to exist. This is the loci of why copyright exists.
The cost to society now outweighs the benefits and we exist within a market bubble right now: A copyright bubble. Large corporations and governments alike have bought into it and driven up its cost. Like any market-driven force however, it will eventually return to equilibrium. We had the dot com bubble, and the housing bubble, but that’s nothing compared to what’s going on right now — we lost billions when that one burst. We stand to lose trillions when this one does. And, ironically, it will be burst by the very forces that businesses are embracing right now — labor capital in the third world.
Which is exactly why, right now, governments around the world are drafting a copyright treaty between themselves in secret. They know that as soon as the lesser-developed countries have come forward a bit more infrastructurally, they’ll be at a point where they can leverage a free flow of history, ideas, and information to dramatically improve their economies. Just as plans for the machinery that powered the industrial revolution was witheld from countries that didn’t have it, so too have the tools to begin the information revolution been witheld.
Let’s face it — less developed countries are not going to pay licensing costs and fork over the money circulating in their economy back to us: They’re going to pour it back into modernization of their own economies. The only way they can do that is by asserting sovereignty and independence from the global copyright framework being developed. That’s why there’s such a push right now to lock them out if they don’t join in the global copyright racket. If this effort fails, the bubble will burst and trillions of dollars will drain out of the economies of the western world like someone pulled the plug out of the bathtub, because the marketplace will be much, much bigger. That’s why if you ask for copies of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, the government will tell you it’s unavailable for reasons of national security. But you don’t need to have the text to know what it intends to do.
The chinese are already producing very cheap material goods. What do you think’s going to happen when they start producing very cheap services as well? Nobody’s going to pay $400 for an operating system; Not when the Chinese have their own that sells for $5 each on a DVD. They have more honor students than we have students — and each will work for dollars a day.
You wrote on “Against Monopoly” as an illustrative comment that: “The problem with trademark is that holders overreach its purpose to prevent confusion and deceit, and attempt to claim exclusive use of their mark in all contexts.” While the narrative above is not limited to trademark; trademark is only one of many examples were content creators have aggrandized the use so-called intellectual property laws to claim exclusive control even to the point of restricting post-sale use.
Furthermore, the “proof” for infringement seems to increasingly short circuit the legal process itself and the penalty for “infringement” is becoming ever more onerous. A legal system that works only to benefit one segment of society will eventually implode.
Copyright works only to benefit immortal corporations (evidenced by the immortal span of copyright).
What’s more, corporations aren’t even a segment of society, they’re a legally created golem, a charismatic psychopath with the creator’s mission to ‘profit at all costs’. Human directors are actually prosecuted if they deviate from this mission. So, there’s no point looking to any lesser staff to make the organisation more socially considerate or humane. Any appearance of such humanity is simply a PR strategy – and it fools far too many inside and out.
So it’s not surprising that corporations collaborate in common pursuit of ever greater powers to obtain ever greater profits. That includes overreaching trademark, copyright, patent, or anything else that comprises a grant of unnatural power, especially over people. People are cattle (consumers) to be exploited by corporations.
The solution is obvious. Abolish unnatural privileges and pull the plug on corporate personhood. Change corporations into associations of individuals with collective responsibility for whatever objective they agree to pursue.
Unfortunately, it’s going to require a lot more social depredation on the part of corporations before people are roused into realising such a solution is needed.
In Transformative Vs Incremental Change Steve Lawson produces a good summation of the crisis facing the recording industry, and why this isn’t a crisis for the artist, but an opportunity (one that publishing corporations do not want artists to take).
When you take an industry that has 4 big costs – recording, manufacture, distribution, promotion – and remove 3 of them, that changes everything.
Costs have been removed from the picture, but this only represents a loss in revenue to the publishing corporations – not to artists. Artists can now take advantage of this all being done for free – instead of signing to a label in order pay them their rates that were inflated in the first place.
Both ends were overcharged. The fan was overcharged for a copy, and the artist was overcharged for the label to produce, promote, distribute, and retail their art.
Now that the extortionate costs have been removed, what will happen when both ends meet directly?
Advertising is completely broken. Recording tech is better and cheaper than it has ever been, fans are more and more willing to talk about and share your music, and far more happy to buy physical product from you than from a third party. Website merch is easy to do, either in short run, big order or even one-offs.
The record industry before the internet was built on the assumption that to have a chance of making it ‘big’, you needed to have deep pockets to risk the kind of gambling collateral needed to have a shot at being in the 0.1% who ended up rich. The labels funded their gambling by owning the services they were charging you for, by keeping you in debt so they didn’t have to pay you, by keeping product prices artificially high, and by perpetuating myths about what it was that we all wanted and needed, as both artists and consumers.
Everything has changed. If you look at the current possibilities as an incremental change to the industry – that is, if you see the infrastructure as still being the same, and see MP3s as ‘invisible CDs’, you are truly truly screwed. It’s awful. That’s why the industry says ‘the sky is falling’. They aren’t willing to let go of that old infrastructure.
If you see the real changes, throw all the cards in the air, and realise that instead of hundreds of artists making millions of pounds, we can how have millions of artists making hundreds of pounds (and a straight, shallow line on the curve up from there), we’re all in good shape.
I think the mechanism behind popular support for copyright that makes the pill you mention here hard to swallow is the old adage that you cannot punish the rich without punishing the dream of the common man.
Even the poor will defend the rich in many capitalistic endeavors, even when the endeavors are outdated or immoral and even when the poor are the ones carrying the litter. They expect they’ll get to ride it next, and many feel as though they deserve to step on the next generation for payback when they got stepped on by the last generation. It’s like fraternity hazing, and it gels people together in a way that is difficult to extricate rationally.
Just imagine smokers, for a moment. US culture has done a strangely successful job at ousting tobacco from the spotlight of fashion. But it was a tough road getting here. Smokers would band together and despise nonsmokers. I’ve heard of places of work where those who did not take smoke breaks with the crew were overlooked for promotions. The lesson I learn here is, “Those who do not share in my follies highlight my own folly”.. like the small child calling out the Emperor on his (lack of) new clothes.
This will be a difficult nut to crack for anyone who has already “inhaled” regarding intellectual property. People who have already invested in potential content monopoly by paying now to record that which they expect to make back later have heavy interest tied into their “back catalog”, which has speculative marketing value so long as you rape culture using copyright, but without copyright it becomes already-published material potentially available for free from anyone who already has a copy. All of that “value” the individual used to “own” and bled so much to create is now no longer fungible. Sure, new works can turn coin at first sale, but old works cannot flow through that turbine.
We need to help artists in positions such as this understand the marketing value of older works. Anyone who seeks to take early advantage of post-copyright business models should “convert” their back catalog from having monetary value into having marketing value.
Follow the example of Monty Python folks, and distribute your works online! Significant monetary value no longer exists in the materials which you have already released to the public. So sacrifice your vain hopes in said monetary value for real dividends in marketing value! :3
Individual artists/journalists seeking a new source of commission
Dinosaur publishers seeking the philosopher’s stone (the fabled business model that enables them to continue selling that which people can make themselves for nothing).
I describe it as a paradigm inversion: Your readers pay you to write. You don’t charge your readers to read.
Thus the nimble and mammalian journalists will inexorably realise that their future customers and commissioners are their readers, and the dinosaurs will create walled gardens in a futile attempt to charge readers to read – slowly suffocating through a lack of the oxygen of publicity.
In the following comments in the context of newspapers, it’s interesting to see our language (cf Bill Garber) converging, and yet I suspect it remains polarised on either side of the paradigm inversion. So it may well be that the inversion, when it happens is hardly noticed. The Earth’s magnetic field may flip, but we’ll simply change the labels on all the magnets and compasses, so that magnetic north remains where we’re comfortable for it to remain.
What were once thought of as members or subscribers1 charged for access to an exclusive club, will become sponsors or patrons willingly contributing to the funding of the public works that they’re interested in – a relationship that all are encouraged to form. From being ‘charged for access’ to ‘paying for publication’. Instead of the audience coming to the circus and paying to see the performance, the audience pays the circus to broadcast the performance.
What has enabled and caused this change? The Internet.
From having to visit a single location to buy tickets, or purchase a single copy as both product and ticket, the global audience can now purchase tickets at home, and see the performance at home.
The problem is that inversion, the reversal of power roles. The vendor is no longer the only one with the illusion of control. Tomorrow the customers are also blessed with that conceit. The customers unwittingly self-organise into a body that commissions the vendor’s production. The same product is made, the same money changes between the same hands. However, the public is no longer subject to the publishers’ will. It’s the scary situation where both have something the other wants, but a new more equitable deal has to be made where both sides recognise the other as their equal.
The customer is no longer a submissive cow to be milked, where art and news are continually substituted with lower grade filler or content until it ends up being fed with its own offal and faeces.
The artist and journalist is also no longer a captive attraction in a theme park where a robber baron charges saps for access and erases their cameras on exit. It would be wise to consider the inversion where the customer is in the castle that is their home and charges the artist and journalist their labour for access (this ties in with Bill Densmore’s ‘attention’). If you’re an artist or journalist then you’ll be nimble enough to leave the theme park and allow your services to visit the customers interested in purchasing them. If you’re a theme park owner you’re in trouble. You may well believe that salvation lies in making your attractions ever more irresistible, and ever more secret and secure behind ever higher walls, but then there’s not much I can suggest that fits that niche except virtual prostitution. Even massive multiplayer games can operate with free spectators.
It’s a hard enough task trying to persuade artists to leave the meagre security of their captors and deal directly with their audiences, but they’re going to have to do it sooner or later, as their fourth estate crumbles into ruin about them and ceases its ability to provide shelter or serve as an effective marketplace.
The paradigm inversion is underway. Relationships are changing. Solutions are being developed. Pioneers are exploring them. Thousands of flowers will bloom (even if as yet we see only a few pretty daisies in a flower pot). Doc Searls was among the first to recognise and understand this revolution, and he is not charging for access to an exclusive club. Everyone is free to join the cluetrain. For some earlier discussion re Emancipay (formerly PayChoice), see PayChoice for Newspapers. And everything else that’s free.
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1 ‘Subscriber’ once meant ‘underwriter, pledgor, contributor or patron’, and that’s a definition it will soon revert to from the one its had for the last three centuries: ‘one regularly charged for use, access to, or a copy of, a publication or broadcast service’. Just as the magnetic pole can flip, so can the meanings of our words. ‘Subscriber’ last inverted in meaning when copyright was enacted in 1710 – from a dominant commissioner to one who submits to a charge. (qvAssurance contracts).
On the new a2f2a website Billy Bragg asks me “Why do you believe you have a natural right to share and build upon the published music you receive without having to seek permission, or pay any tax or royalty?”
To me this is akin to asking me why I believe the Earth is spherical.
It is not an unreasonable question, especially if we simply take what we’ve grown used to at face value as ‘the way things are’. Consequently, for the Earth to be flat doesn’t seem particularly unnatural. However, if you take any time to investigate things in depth, just as you realise that the Earth can’t possibly be flat, you realise that one can’t possibly have a natural right to prevent others making copies of anything that you give to them.
Just as a basket maker has never naturally been able to prevent those who purchase their baskets from making copies or using them to carry silver without a cut, so a songwriter or musician has never naturally been able to prevent those who hear their songs or tunes from singing or performing them, or doing so for money without royalty. It has always taken a potentate and their police force to do such things, e.g. prohibit the wearing of imperial colours or collect a levy on wine. Individuals naturally born as equals are not born with such a privilege of dictating what other people may or may not do with the things they have made, purchased, or discovered (irrespective of similarity to, or provenance from, any other). Even the power of collecting a tithe, levy, tax, or royalty takes the power of a church, baron, or king to achieve.
Natural rights are those powers or abilities to defend their interests that individuals are born with (as equals), i.e. the power to protect their lives (their bodies), their privacy (and the possessions within it), the truth (their apprehension of it against deceit or impairment), and their liberty (against the will of others). Rather than solely relying upon each individual’s physical strength these natural rights are supposed to be additionally and fairly protected by a government empowered by the people precisely for this purpose. Such a government is not empowered to grant privileges (though sadly, by dint of the power they can assume, they do anyway).
In 1710 Queen Anne suspended from individuals’ natural right to liberty their right to copy or perform the original works of others. This right to copy was reserved as a transferable privilege initially attached to each original work, hence ‘copyright’. In effect the individual’s inalienable liberty had been alienated from them by the state to serve both the state’s interest in seeing political expression controlled, and the interest of the stationers’ guild in continuing their members’ monopolies (especially as legally enforceable). Neither state nor guild was interested in their power or profits being undermined by the propaganda or piracy of an uncontrolled press.
Three centuries later, we are still born with the natural right to copy or perform the original works of1 others, but there now exists a privilege known as ‘copyright’ that enables the holder thereof to exclude us from doing so. Government via the police protect our natural rights, but they do not protect privileges. This is why the police aren’t supposed to arrest people for singing songs against the copyright holder’s wishes or making recordings at concerts and selling copies thereof. The responsibility and expense of policing and asserting their privilege is entirely that of the copyright holder. Well, it has been until relatively recently. The publishing corporations are lobbying for their privilege of copyright to become as protected by the state as any natural right of an individual. Such privileges are also known as legal rights, since whilst they appear to recognise a right, that right does not arise in nature (to be protected by law), but arises only from the law itself (protecting the state’s, crown’s, or lobbyists’ special interests).
So, all discussion of the legal rights artists may still need or those that might remain lucrative to them, even if copyright’s ability to exclude unauthorised copies is largely ineffective, are misguided. Ethically, people can only ask for the protection of the natural rights they have, not those privileges they may covet or believe they need to make a living. They should certainly not be tempted to adjust one privilege into another, e.g. if one’s privilege is no longer able to prevent copies made by another, one should be given the privilege of extracting a royalty from another, if their business involves the use of one’s work.
The distinction of natural right from state granted privilege is not new thinking, but was well known even as the US Constitution was being framed in 1787. See the WikiPedia entry concerning the work Rights of Man by Thomas Paine:
Human rights originate in Nature, thus, rights cannot be granted via political charter, because that implies that rights are legally revocable, hence, would be privileges:
It is a perversion of terms to say that a charter gives rights. It operates by a contrary effect — that of taking rights away. Rights are inherently in all the inhabitants; but charters, by annulling those rights, in the majority, leave the right, by exclusion, in the hands of a few . . . They . . . consequently are instruments of injustice.
The fact, therefore, must be that the individuals, themselves, each, in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist.
The US Constitution correctly recognised that authors and inventors have a natural exclusive right to their writings and inventions (where exclusive – deriving from the individual’s natural right to privacy). However, while this right should certainly have been secured, it should never have been extended or substituted with the grant of monopolies. It just goes to show how appealing monopolies are to those interested in them that they were legislated anyway (in 1790), in spite of the Constitution.
What we see today is that copyright is not only a privilege that conflicts with individuals’ natural rights (their cultural liberty and freedom of speech), but a privilege that conflicts with the very nature of information and its communication. It is simply not possible (even for the state, let alone an individual), to remotely constrain the distribution of intellectual works, because it is not possible to remotely constrain the communication and diffusion of information (despite the snake oil that is DRM).
So, it is foolish to suggest either that copyright’s term is shortened (to 28 years, 28 weeks, or even 28 days later), or that those whose business may be seen to benefit from the use of another’s work should pay a share of their earnings. Such privilege is preposterous and an offense against both nature and man. It is a protection racket of those already corrupt and powerful, or of those who have become corrupted by unnatural power.
We earn a living from our work by exchanging it with the work of others, voluntarily. Money=work. There’s nothing wrong in exchanging our labour, in selling the music we make or the copies we make of others’. What’s wrong is in being unnaturally able to prevent anyone else doing so, or being able to demand a royalty. What we have a right to is the free exchange of our work or possessions (liberty). We do not have a right to give our work away and then demand payment for its possession, use, or reproduction. Such a ‘right’ would be appealing, but nature has not seen fit to imbue us with it.
Without unnatural monopoly, we’re still left with the natural ability to sell our music, and the ability to make and sell copies of it. However, there is no market for copies that people don’t need to buy (that a monopoly can no longer prevent being made). The market for musicians is in making music that people want to buy (in preference to, or in addition to, making their own).
The market for copies has ended. The market for music continues unabated. There is neither need nor sanction for monopoly or any other privilege.
I and umpteen thousand others may pay you a penny to write or sing a song, and you may consider that an equitable exchange. However, my audience can also pay me to sing that song and I don’t owe you a penny – naturally. That’s how it used to be, and that’s how it should be. We just have the embarrassment of three centuries in which we put up with a state granted privilege that had it otherwise.
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1 That’s ‘of’ as in ‘authored by’, not as in ‘owned by’. It is an unfortunate ambiguity of the English language that possessive prepositions and pronouns are used for authorship/paternity as well as ownership or physical possession, especially when there’s considerable interest in some quarters for the meanings to become permanently conflated.
(assuming it gets moderated in) I have commented on this thread: a2f2a.com/2009/10/19…
Say, Billy mentioned making a new thread for discussing copyright. Do you know how one could find that Crosbie? Also, anywhere there did you link back to the answer you supplied here?
The worm is turning from a cultural sloth into a cultural insurrectionist. There is a rebellion afoot, where artists and their fans are now reasserting their natural rights and deciding to do business with each other directly. It is a movement to escape the shackles of the publishing corporations’ unethical privilege of copyright, to escape from the indentured penury of publishers’ deceptive contracts.
This is the end of copyright, and the disintermediation of those who would use it to extort and abuse the people.
This is the beginning of the digital renaissance, a new enlightenment that rediscovers the natural relationship that should exist between artists and those who appreciate them. One that existed until it was corrupted by the cultural constraint of copyright in the 18th century, and is now all but suffocated by the pervasive and insipid pulp produced by the multinational publishing cartels.
And to mark this beginning a new website has arisen, a2F2a.com, a site prompted by the historic rapprochement between Billy Bragg (FAC) and Jon Newton (P2PNet), to discuss, deliberate and document this more natural way in which artists can relate to their fans, and those fans can relate to their artists. A kind of relationship that is prosperous without being exploitative, and one that not only embraces the radically different economics of the digital age, but also necessarily restores the people’s cultural liberty.
However, just as people should no longer be dismissed as couch potato consumers to be fed the lowest common denominator, we must also recognise that we are all artists and all fans. We may well sometimes be fans of more artists than we have fans of our own, but fundamentally we are more than simply an either/or ‘artist or fan’, we are all individuals. The term ‘artist’ or ‘fan’ denotes a role or relationship, not a political status nor a social caste.
As creative individuals, we are all artists and many of us would welcome a financial incentive to produce our art.
As individuals appreciative of creativity, we are all fans and would be pleased to offer our favourite artists a financial incentive to produce their art.
We have to get back to such fundamentals before we can recognise that the traditional recording and publishing industry we see falling into decay and corruption before us had been built upon expedient foundations of 18th century permafrost – the treacherous foundations of unethical privileges that have now melted into a stagnant swamp that impedes all cultural progress.
The structures we build from this day forth to facilitate a more natural and ethically sound relationship must be built back on the same bedrock that mankind’s cultural heritage has been based on since the stone age and as relatively recently as the 14-16th century European renaissance.
We need to get back to an ethical incentive: money for art, liberty for people.
Sounds nice. I cannot see anywhere their stance about copyright. Is copyright an issue this community holds a firm stance on, or a matter they discuss, or gloss over?
As a2f2a.com has only just been launched I think all issues are currently ‘to be discussed’. After all, the ink on their mission statement still smudges.
However, given that this site is a meeting of those interested in exchanging art for money (artists, fans), and those interested in the restoration of their liberty to share and build upon published works (fans, artists), then a ‘stance about copyright’ is inescapable.
If you’re interested I’m sure they’d welcome your participation.
I like the welcome statements at a2f2a. The hostility they mention is always striking to me when I see it at techdirt and elsewhere. All the contempt and fear. (And I can understand the concern. Things are changing. People are afraid of what they imagine is being lost. And something is being lost, for some people…)
On another note — although related in that some of the hostility appears there — have you see this:
I think one of the final hurdles people have to overcome in terms of grokking cultural liberty (that is a prominent issue in the article you link to as well as it will be on a2f2a), is the “Well, ok, you can make and share copies of my work, but only for free – if you start making any money I damn well want a cut!” mentality.
It is that mentality that not only causes paradigm shift pains to nouveau copylefters, but also lies at the root of movements to claim royalties on sale of second hand copies (droit de suite).
It surely can only be copyright indoctrination that persuades people that unlike material workers, intellectual workers deserve a share of any earnings the purchasers of their products obtain through their utilisation, adaptation, or value added resale.
Sell your work and move on. Let it go. You’ve made your money, let the purchaser make theirs.
Clearly, the fundamental issue of preserving our cultural heritage is being neglected in favour of either protecting the privilege of copyright against inexorable, pragmatic dilution, or squabbling over the imagined treasure Google must have scryed in the fruits of scanning vast libraries of printed works.
In other words, we’re looking at the moronic perpetuation of a culturally counter productive privilege by morons for morons (publishing corporations), simply because it helps their bottom line and damn the preservation of mankind’s cultural commonwealth.
In the case of orphan works, instead of being unwitting arson, it’s more like the slow fire of rust, i.e. the irresponsible neglectfulness typical of kids who leave their bike out in the rain when they’ve been distracted by something more worthwhile, but who will scream blue murder if they see any other kid lay a finger on it.
Far better to harness the vast information storage resources we have to store great numbers of redundant copies, than to leave the last remaining books or manuscripts at the mercy of ‘Soylent’ caretakers still deliberating as to which shelf should next be emptied to stoke the building’s central heating furnace.
This is why Google’s book scanning should be embraced irrespective of any handwringing angst over the potentially unauthorised copies so made.
What would people prefer in a few decade’s time?
The preservation of unethical legislation that prohibits unauthorised copies, OR
A digitally preserved cultural heritage that also includes printed works?
Sod the printers’ prerogative, what’s the point of them publishing mankind’s knowledge if their petulance prevents its preservation?
We need to have a Fahrenheit 451 day, where in an act of civil disobedience people bring out their book scanners and wilfully take pains to preserve that which a corrupt state has prohibited them from preserving.
I’ve been noticing that people get hung up on the idea that “creating original work” is the only means by which value can be created. Google indexing the web is “making money on the backs of everyone else”, and so forth.
People don’t grok that pattern and organization are at least as valuable as raw data is. Of course they might change their minds if you ran a utility that rearranges every byte on their hard drive so as to be sorted in numeric value. All the raw information is still there, but is absolutely meaningless without it’s context of organization.
I think creating ‘original’ work is great, worthwhile and valuable, however, the value is best determined in a goodwill or monetary free market exchange with the interested audience. Such value should not be presumed and should certainly not constitute sanction to suspend the public’s liberty to share and build upon that work (to profit publishers and the interests of the state in controlling the press).
Spacial or temporal pattern/organisation is information. A rearrangement thus affects the information. If irreversible then information has been lost. If you write a poem in Scrabble tiles and someone then comes along and sorts them into alphabetical order, the information constituting the poem is lost and one must hope the poem is memorised elsewhere. That’s not the same as an information preserving rearrangement, e.g. where a code is used to encrypt the poem.
Yep, my “rearrangement” comment is a jab at philosophical reductionism. A whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts simply because “sum” does not infer the original organisation nor relationship of those parts.
For example a reductionist might argue that a human being is nothing more than a collection of chemicals you can get for a few dollars at a chemistry store. The truth of course being that while there may by no other significant physical ingredients present, the immensely intricate organisation of those ingredients is not only noteworthy but almost exclusively important to the inestimable value of a human person.
By the same token, it is foolish to overestimate the value of “original work” so much as to prefer such work remain forever separated from anyone who may benefit from it than to allow it to be organized.
Be it trillions of web pages with no comprehensive index due to the perceived IP invasion of the indexing process (in a hypothetical past where search engines could legally never get started), or millions of out of print books languishing forgotten in bookstores and libraries scattered over the globe today for precisely the same reason.
Unfortunately, in oberving the value of a selection or index, people believe that some of that value must be due to what is being selected or indexed. However, even if it was (which it isn’t), the thing indexed has already been paid for.
If someone arranges a box of matches into a work of art, the artist has no dues to the match maker, even if the matches remain valuable. Of course, if the match maker had been given the privilege of collecting a royalty should any of their matches be used commercially (as opposed to domestically), they may well still have a claim for a share should the work of art be sold.
It is only the privilege that has value to its holder, and its infringement that seems a loss to them. Those who have grown up with privilege see it as a right, and can’t see the natural right that it violates, and the real cost it represents to others who have lost that natural right.
Everyone should be free to index published works, not just Google.
Everyone should be free to broadcast published music from their radio station or make and distribute copies from their website. And that’s free of royalty or tax.
Similarly, all musicians should be free to exchange their labour of producing new music that builds upon the music of others, with the money of their enthusiastic audience. Those musicians will in turn be among the audiences of those artists whose work they build upon.
To instead suspend people’s liberty, to place constraints on society’s cultural productivity and progress in order to reward and control the press, is an 18th century corruption that should have been abolished along with slavery.
Naturally, you are free to take any liberties you wish with these published works. However, should a privilege ever be granted to constrain your liberty then its holders constrain you thus: the liberties you take may not be withheld from those to whom you give these works (or your combined/derivative works), who you must similarly constrain.
A vendor selling a copy or imitation that is misrepresented as the genuine article is committing a falsehood, a deceit. This has been recognised as something that should be prohibited since time immemorial.
However, a vendor selling a copy or imitation that is honestly represented as a copy, derivative, or imitation of another work is committing no falsehood or deceit. This has also been recognised as something perfectly natural and to be embraced since time immemorial. Man has progressed precisely through a process of sharing knowledge, copying songs, stories, tools and techniques and improving them.
The unnatural law that was introduced in 1710 by Queen Anne was the privilege of a reproduction monopoly granted to printers of literary works, and this at a stroke suspended the public’s right to make copies – a natural right that they had enjoyed as part of their natural liberty since time immemorial.
So, what happens when the public find themselves in possession of ever more powerful reproduction technology?
To say, because the 18th century privilege is still law three centuries later, that it is therefore the law that is right and the people who are in the wrong is to blind yourself to the reality of the conflict, to refuse to recognise the nature of people and information.
The Digital Economy Bill is simply yet another attempt to provide the privileged with additional legal sanctions, to effectively give King Canute yet more extreme powers to hold back the incorrigibly disobedient tide.
The Internet is essentially a system for instantaneously diffusing (distributing & reproducing) digital, intellectual works. A transferable 18th century privilege that requires that no-one distributes or reproduces an intellectual work without permission from the holder of that privilege is at best an anachronism, and at worst an unethical statute that should never have been enacted.
This writing is on the wall. If you hesitate to copy it and freely distribute it among your peers you are not dutifully respecting the privilege and law that suspends your liberty to do so, but committing yourself into ignorance and cultural suicide.