Earth: Mostly Harmless

What UK’s copyright industries are up to

The latest developments in the ongoing and ill-informed IP debate from my well-informed fellow copyfighter Cory Doctorow. The very phrase ‘intellectual property‘ gives me the shivers, but that’s a story for another day. I’ll let Adam Singer’s rhetoric speak for itself.

What UK’s copyright industries are up to:
Cory Doctorow: The BBC’s Matt Locke has written a great report on yesterday’s meeting on copyright in the UK that was held by a minister who is reported to have called for extending copyright on performances to the performer’s life plus one hundred years.

Adam Singer gave a response from the stage that was full of fantastic rhetoric, describing the emerging market for 3D printers as a harbinger of a world in which all creative IP is under threat from piracy: “It doesn’t matter if the button says ‘print’ [in reference to 3D printers] or ‘burn’ - all design will become simply a file to be shared”. He saw strong IP as the “intellectual hygiene of a networked world”, suggesting that IP law should be taught as the “new domestic science” in schools, as it was the most important future skill for creative entrepreneurs. His rhetoric, although very entertaining, was from the dystopian end of the telescope - “each time bandwith increases, another industry will fall [because of IP theft]“. You could try to unpick all the false assumptions in that last sentence, but frankly, its not worth it. Just sit back and bask in the warm glow of his fire and brimstone. In fairness, Adam Singer is far more measured and informed than the above quotes suggest (despite describing Lawrence Lessig as the “Martin Luther of copyright” that the music industry had failed to burn…), but he’s a great public speaker, and it’s his job to provoke.

I asked a question to the panel about the kind of industry trends that the DCMS were looking into when developing new IP models for the creative industries. Writers like Henry Chesbrough and Eric Von Hippel have documented trends in ‘old’ industries like Pharma and Engineering towards ‘open innovation’ models. Emerging best practise is to maximise your return from IP through a range of licensing models outside your own company, moving from old models of patent enforcement to open licensing models with peer companies and even Von Hippel’s ‘Free Revealing’, where IP is given up in order to drive other competitive advantages.

Link

(Via Boing Boing.)

On a related note, it looks like the late Sonny Bono is posthumously taking his views global via proposed European legislation. It is indeed a sad day.

Lawrence Lessig’s other court case

A remarkable turn of events in a case I sadly wasn’t aware of before this article was published. It involves Larry Lessig, founder of the Creative Commons project, who is currently pursuing a negligence action on behalf of a former pupil of the American Boychoir School, where Lessig himself was evidently abused as a boy. The article linked to below also includes a profile of the reluctant public figure that is Harvard Law’s star professor. At times it is biting in criticism of Lessig’s intellectual record but is nonetheless generally affectionate towards him. Worth a read.

Lawrence Lessig’s other court case:

A dramatic update on Professor Lawrence Lessig’s other court case written by his friend John Heilemann appears in New York Metro magazine this week. And this is a battle that critics as well as supporters are praying will end in victory for the lawyer and scholar this time.

Lessig is representing John Hardwicke, who like himself is a former pupil of the American Boychoir School (now the Columbus Boychoir School) in Princeton, New Jersey. Hardwicke claims he was abused by multiple staff including the music director. The school argued it should be immune from such negligence lawsuits, and a trial court had agreed. Incredibly, the school even claimed the sex between now fugitive choir director and Hardwicke was consensual. The case was heard by the state’s supreme court, and in what reads like a movie script, the evidence turned on Lessig himself.

In the court room, Lessig tore up the rule book and confronted years of private torment by revealing that he had been abused himself at the school.

“It was the perversion of this music director . . . to believe that sexual abuse was part of producing a wonderful boychoir,” he disclosed to the court. Lessig said he knew that this was what the director believed, because the director himself had disclosed this to Lessig at the school.

(Via The Register.)

Intellectual property, the content industries & the Internet

A few interesting stories going around the web today on the subject of copyright. Firstly, Arstechnica reports on that software-patent-peddling lobby group, the Business Software Association:

BSA doesn’t think the DMCA goes far enough:

“The Business Software Alliance has published a white paper that outlines their political aspirations for 2005, which unsurprisingly feature copyright and patent law reformation and enforcement at the top of the list. One of the complaints is that the DMCA doesn’t go far enough in granting power to intellectual property holders.

One of the quaint gems given to this fine country by the DMCA is § 512 of Title 17 of the United States Code. Titled as ‘Limitations on liability relating to material online,’ this section of the statute sought to shield online service providers from liability for what end users did on their networks. In short, it was legislated that an online service provider could escape liability if that provider both responded to subpoenas for the identification of a network user suspected of infringing activity,” and complies with properly formed subpoenas issued by a clerk of any United States district court, the provider could essentially avoid unwanted legal action.

Hence, the birth of the “take down notice,” and the subpoena for identification. The latter, however, has stumbled in recent years. While the argument of “secondary liability” brought down the likes of Napster, that same argument when applied to internet service providers completely failed.”

The number of DCMA take-down notices served recently is frightening. What’s worrying is that, as Ars points out, material can be removed simply on the accusation of copyright infringement - no injunction required. The BSA’s goal is apparently to extend this presumption of infringement to communications companies identifying infringing customers.

Free Culture

I’ve just downloaded Lawrence Lessig’s new eBook Free Culture, which is being released as a PDF under a Creative Commons license. Looks like a good read. Lessig argues early on in the introduction that too rigid an IP regime can lead to a negative incentive to innovate, contrary to the claims of the lobby groups:

But just as a free market is perverted if its property becomes feudal,so too can a free culture be queered by extremism in the property rights that define it.That is what I fear about our culture today.It is against that extremism that this book is written.

Lessig, Lawrence (2004), Free Culture, http://www.lessig.org

In fact, any first year economics textbook will tell you that intellectual property protections, such as patents and copyright, are always a balancing act. Too light a regime will lead to anarchy and no incentive to innovate, yet as Lessig argues, allowing rights holders a pseudo-governmental role stifles cultural and economic growth, because derivative works are and always have been an important facilitator of human endeavour.

One of the most worrying provisions of the DMCA is that prohibiting the circumvention of copy-control measures, even for academic purposes. Its implications are obvious, but even from the content owners’ point of view, it makes no sense. How do they expect to get a strong crypto regime in place without the beneficial effects of the peer review process? The number of vendor-introduced DRM systems (remember the Cactus CD marker pen trick, or Fairplay, the iTunes store cracks) in the past couple of years would support this.