Like a fever, revolutions come in waves. And if this is a revolution, then it broke first on November 4, 2008, with the election of Barack Obama, second, on February 19, 2009, with the explosion of anger by Rick Santelli, giving birth to the Tea Party, and third, on September 10, 2011 with the #Occupy movements that are now spreading across the United States.
The souls in these movements must now decide whether this third peak will have any meaningful effect — whether it will unite a radically divided America, and bring about real change, or whether it will be boxed up by a polarized media, labeled in predictable ways, and sent off to the dust bins of cultural history.
In the Civil Rights Movement, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., championed a strategy of non-violence: that in the face of state sponsored and tolerated aggression, the strongest response was a promise not to respond in kind.
In this movement, we need a similar strategy. Of course a commitment to non-violence. But also a commitment to non-contradiction: We need to build and define this movement not by contradicting the loudest and clearest anger on the Right, but instead, by finding the common ground in our demands for reform.
So when Ron Paul criticizes the “Wall Street bailouts,” and attacks government support for “special businesses” with special access, we should say, “that’s right, Congressman Paul.” Bailouts for the rich is not the American way.
And when Rick Santelli launches a Tea Party movement, by attacking the government’s subsidies “to the losers,” we should ask in reply, what about the subsidies “to the winners” — to the banks who engineered the dumbest form of socialism ever invented by man: socialized risk with privatized benefits. What, we should ask Mr. Santelli, about that subsidy?
Or when Republican Senator Richard Shelby tells NBC’s Meet the Press that the message in bank reform “should be, unambiguously, that nothing’s too big to fail,” we should say that’s right, Senator, and it’s about time our Congress recognized it.
Or when Sarah Palin calls GE the “poster child of crony capitalism,” we should say “Amen, Mamma Grisly”: For whether or not we are all believers in “capitalism,” we should all be opponents of “crony capitalism,” the form of capitalism that is increasingly dominating Washington, and that was partly responsible for the catastrophe on Wall Street in 2008, and hence the catastrophes throughout America since.
We should practice “non-contradiction,” not because we have no differences with the Right. We do. We on the Left, we Liberals, or as some prefer, we Progressives, have fundamental differences with people on the Right. Our vision of that “shining city on the hill” is different from theirs. Our hopes for “We, the People,” are more aspirational. More egalitarian. More ideal.
But even though our substantive views are different, we should recognize that we have not yet convinced a majority of America of at least some of our fundamental views. And that in a democracy, no faction has the right to hold a nation hostage to its extreme views, whether right or not. We should fight in the political system to win support for our Liberal views. But we should reject the idea that protest, or violence, or blackmail are legitimate political techniques for advancing views that have not yet prevailed in a democratic system.
Instead, we should use the energy and anger of this extraordinary movement to find the common ground that would justify this revolution for all Americans, and not just us. And when we find that common ground, we should scream it, and yell it, and chant it, again, and again, and again.
For there is a common ground between the anger of the Left and the anger of the Right: That common ground is a political system that does not work. A government that is not responsive, or — in the words of the Framers, the favorite source of insight for our brothers on the Right — a government that is not, as Federalist 52 puts it, “dependent upon the People alone.”
Because this government is not dependent upon “the People alone.” This government is dependent upon the Funders of campaigns. 1% of America funds almost 99% of the cost of political campaigns in America. Is it therefore any surprise that the government is responsive first to the needs of that 1%, and not to the 99%?
This government, we must chant, is corrupt. We can say that clearly and loudly from the Left. They can say that clearly and loudly from the Right. And we then must teach America that this corruption is the core problem — it is the root problem — that we as Americans must be fighting.
There could be no better place to name that root than on Wall Street, New York. For no place in America better symbolizes the sickness that is our government than Wall Street, New York. For it is there that the largest amount of campaign cash of any industry in America was collected; and it was there that that campaign cash was used to buy the policies that created “too big to fail”; and it was there that that campaign cash was used to buy the get-out-of-jail free card, which Obama and the Congress have now given to Wall Street in the form of a promise of no real regulatory change, and an assurance of “forgiveness.”
“Forgiveness” — not of the mortgages that are now underwater. The foreclosures against them continue. “Forgiveness” — not even of the sins now confessed by Wall Street bankers, for our President has instructed us, no crimes were committed. “Forgiveness” — just enough to allow candidates once again to race to Wall Street to beg for the funds they need to finance their campaigns. The dinner parties continue. The afternoons at the golf course are the same. It’s not personal. It’s just business. It is the business of government corrupted.
There is no liberal, or libertarian, or conservative who should defend these policies. There is no liberal, or libertarian, or conservative who should defend this corruption. The single problem we all should be able to agree about is a political system that has lost is moral foundation: For no American went to war to defend a democracy “dependent upon the Funders alone.” No mother sacrificed her son or daughter to the cause of a system that effectively allows the law to be sold to the highest bidder.
We are Americans, all of us, whether citizens or not. We are Americans, all of us, because we all believe in the ideal of a government responsive to “the People alone.” And we all, as Americans, regardless of the diversity of our views, need to stand on this common ground and shout as loudly as we can: End this corruption now. Get the money out of government. Or at least get the special interest money out of government. And put back in its place a government dependent upon, and responsive too, the people. Alone.
“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil” — Thoreau, 1846, On Walden — “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one striking at the root.”
If this fever is to have its effect, if this revolution is to have any meaning, if this struggle — and the carnival notwithstanding, it is an obvious struggle to sleep on the streets — is to have real consequence, then we all, Left and Right, must strike first at that root.
“It is the duty of youth,” they say Kurt Cobain said, “to challenge corruption.” He may have meant a different corruption, if indeed he uttered this poetry too. But whatever he meant, embrace his words. It is your duty to challenge this corruption. And once you have ended it — once we have restored a government that cares about what its people care about first, and not just its funders — then let us get back to the hard and important work of convincing our fellow citizens of the right in everything that is left.
Hi there,
I am a coder as well as a law student (and am, to my knowledge, the only such person currently dumb enough to be implementing an ACS v. Fed. Soc. Atari 2600 game) and, although I may be wrong, I think your logic, Prof. Lessig, is better than the “coder logic” described in your post (I haven’t read the original).
In formal, sentential logic there is a huge difference between saying “for ALL X, Y is true” and “for one X, Y is true.” If the domain of copyright is the set X, the proposal that compulsory licensing is appropriate for some subset of X, call it Y and say for this post that it is coextensive with recorded and published music (although you may think it greater the details are not the point here), does not entail compulsory licensing is appropriate for any member of X not also in subset Y. It seems to me that this logical analogy fits your proposal (although I am very good at being wrong).
A useful inquiry from that proposal would be something like “if set X subset Y is apprioriate for compulsory licensing, why not X subset foo” or simply “why not for all X,” but those are not entailed by your logic. In fact, although they represent good inquiries, logically they irrelevant.
In short (and if you’ve been following my variables), because Y, a subset of X, has the property of “compulsory licensing would be good in Prof. Lessig’s opinion” simply does not speak to the rest of X although inquiring minds should indeed explore it.
-amw
Oh yeah, I also meant to say that Baudio is cool. When I was in college we used to pipe random files to /dev/audio on Solaris boxes, record the output, and incorporate them into various audio things we were creating. At one point we had our band playing to a beat defined by CC and GCC’s audio output. I still think that was really cool.
“Fair use” in America is the right to hire a lawyer
A gem of a quote!
the “Web” does not let you “legally link” to copyright material. Ask 2600 about the rights to link in America today
Nit: For 2600, it’s not “copyright” material, it’s “circumventing” material. The outcome of the 2600 case didn’t hinge on the copyright of DeCSS itself.
Intellectual Reserve, Inc. v. Utah Lighthouse Ministry, Inc. is a better example for copyright, though it’s not net-famous.
I will respond to this statement. “It is true Disney pays to use the Peter Pan story, but the real question stockholders should be asking the Disney Corporation is why.”
Make no mistake, Eisner’s contempt for writers has been the source of longstanding backlash in the creative community. His leadership encourages Mousewitz executives to consider themselves to be actual authors.
Using public domain materials is an excuse for Disney to chisel creatives. Experienced Hollywood hands will caution you not to take ideas into Disney. And not merely because of the non-negotaible lowball prices. They simply steal your idea and run with it.
I agree that old Walt had a special genius, but the Halls of Eisner have a different feel. Eisner is no Disney. The transition to digital reverberates through the ranks of entertainment workers, and Disney/ABC cannot withstand the tsunami under a leader who despises technology.
See LA Times today, for article entitled “Toontown darkens for L.A.’s animation artists, as computers and an overseas workforce overtake their future.”
http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/cl-ca-george21mar21,2,3224957.story
Responsing to tomsong’s comment:
While you are entitled to your opinion,
I find it odd that you give a hint that
it is wrong to copy (or to use your own
word, “steal”) anyone’s idea and exploit
it. In the U.S., ideas are not owned by
anyone and anyone can use the ideas for
anything. So, I ask you, what’s wrong
with that?
Joseph Pietro Riolo
<[email protected]>
Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions
in this comment in the public domain.
I’m not sure what you mean by “3d”, but I assume “1st” is a reference to the first black President. I think Obama would make an excellent President, but I don’t think it likely that someone who’s name rhymes with Iraq Osama is likely to carry many more states than Illinois. Obama is very popular here in Illinois right now, but it may be prohibitively difficult to make a connection in the other 49.
Incidentally, I have heard at least two other commentators say they expect Obama to be President one day. Anyone who particularly wants to see a President Obama one day should probably start dropping his name in their writings now, and not stop stop until he’s elected. (Which, of course, some have begun to do.
I believe you forgot “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” (1996) based on a Victor Hugo novel, IIRC Hugo is not even cited in the Disney movie at all.
Victor Hugo about the balance between authors and public rights.
Laurent
A little dissection of the Forbes review
The Forbes’ review is going to be the rule, I think, and in response, certain points need to be fought on economic grounds. Forbes is spot-on in stating bluntly that “America’s greatest worldwide success” are due to “intellectual property.” Of course, if the writer were a Soviet citizen, they might have said something just as nice about Soviet economic control systems as well.
Forbes: “At a time when intellectual property provides America’s greatest worldwide successes, overturning established international copyright principles to legalize infringers is like abolishing real estate law to help out squatters.” The analogy is valid, but if the writer were intellectually honest enough, he would have expressed some understanding that “real estate law” is just the natural extension of the ethnic cleansing and land divisions and grant policies that came in days before. Just as housing prices (in the Bay Area, especially) will never again be as low (relatively) as they were in the 50’s, so too will “international copyright principles” become overpriced and burdensome to the culture – only its the world culture this time.
Forbes says “…technology has also given consumers powerful weapons of mass reproduction with strong potential for abuse.” Certainly the “abuse” they must be speaking of is that threat that people might aquire a ‘freedom from economics.’ That would be terrible – and in direct contradiction to the usual dogma that spurts the virtues US-run capitalism –maybe ‘centralized economic control system’ might be a term that the Forbes people might appreciate, but maybe not. Certainly they might see “abuse” as something that the consumer might perpetrate upon the proprietor, rather than something that the powerful might extoll upon the meek.
Quoth Forbes: “The intellectual property issue of our time is how to balance the rights of creators and consumers.” I love how the Forbes type will deliberately omit any mention of the other logical beneficiaries of copyright law — namely inheritors, proprietors – private or corporate. Finally, Forbes proclaims: “Let’s make it clear: The artists who would benefit most from Lessig’s legal meddling are rip-off artists.” Am I blind, or is this an echo of “you’re either with us, or you’re with the terrorists” ? It would certainly bode well for ‘Stalinist-style capitalism’ if the above Bushism were applied to global economics.
-SC
I’d be happy to show you around while you’re here.
Copyright is under attack today as never before. The new technologies of the Internet allow for perfect digital copies to spread around the world within hours. Already the music industry is being decimated as net users find that they can download virtually any song ever created, without paying a penny. As technology advances, the same will be true of music, novels, art, virtually everything copyrightable.
Far from an era of overly strong copyright protection, we are entering a time when copyright will essentially cease to exist.
Well, that kind of comments is really amazing but it is true that I keep convincing people, day after day, that copyright law are not some ethereal part of human rights but, more pragmatically, a very limited economical incentive monopoly!
Keep on the good work Professor Lessig!
It’s important to note that all reviews of Lessig’s books are being done by people in the media (i.e. writers) who by their very occupation make their living creating original works and fixing them in a tangible medium. In other words, all writers reviewing this book, as well as Radio and TV and even internet personalities doing the same, are biased.
That they should not be biased is something they should learn from this book… but they won’t simply because at the end of the day the “copying my stuff is stealing from me” meme is where their opinion on the matter is going to be coming from. In other words, for many people this is a book that argues that anyone paid to review books doesn’t deserve to make money. Of course it’s not, but you’d have to read the book with an open mind to discover that fact.
I think “extraordinary” is not one of the adjectives I would have chosen to describe Mr. Manes’ review. But IANAL. 🙂
My copy of the book is on order from Amazon. Can’t wait to get it.
I didn’t see any comments about the Internet in this review, so I’m wondering if you’re silent on that subject this time around. I hope not, because I love it when non-engineers sing the virtues of the Internet, to coin a phrase.
Not to nitpick, but, err, the Sword in the Stone, though Arthurian, was actually based on the book of same name by T.H. White, with the author getting a writing credit and, one assumes, royalties.
White also got credit for Camelot.
Saccharine as all get out, but the films did introduce a generation to Lance, Gwen and the gang.
I have read both Eldred and the complaint, but I don’t agree with your statement about the “only relation” between Eldred and this case.
Paragraphs 112 to 116 of the complaint request the court to reconsider the Eldred decision. At least this part seems to be nothing more than an effort to get Eldred reversed with a new argument.
On the other hand, that is only one part of the complaint. It would indeed be wrong to assume that there is nothing new to be seen here.
Very true, Professor Lenz, though the strategy in a context like this is to preserve a claim, not so much to press it.
Here’s my big fear: because the public-interest theory of copyright is, at least for the time being, not viable, these new lawsuits run the risk of not only reinforcing Eldred’s holding but also closing the true exception set forth for DMCA-style imbalance. That window should not be closed before it can really be tested in court.
Give me just 2kb of your time to explain…
The “traditional contours of copyright” language in Eldred seemed directly and implicitly targeted at the DMCA — the DMCA is the first recent law to remove the balance between judicially established fair use rights as later set down in 17 USC 107 and the copyright holder’s rights to exclude in 17 USC 106. One of the key holdings of both Nation Enterprises and Eldred was, at least in my opinion, that the balance between section 106 and section 107 was sufficient to protect First Amendment interests.
The DMCA removes the impact of section 107, thus creating a first amendment imbalance that demands higher scrutiny. Traditional copyright-first amendment contours have been altered so higher scrutiny applies. That’s all I initially get out of the magic sentence in Eldred.
After Eldred, it seems clear that the traditional contours language refers to first amendment balance, not public interest balance. The former is a constitutional concern, the latter (although the great dissent and many of us commentors disagree) is a matter for congressional balancing — effectively a matter of procedure.
Unfortunately, these new lawsuits, while well intentioned, rely on what Eldred did not say. They try to recast what was lost in Eldred as part of the “traditional contours” subject to higher scrutiny. By aiming to invalidate quasi-perpetual copyright via an “effectively perpetual” rationale, and by arguing the effect of lack of notice and uncertainty on the public, the new lawsuits really do rely on the public-interest theory of copyright mostly rejected in the Eldred decision. It is very difficult to effectively treat these flaws in copyright law as First Amendment flaws that fall into the context of the magic sentence in Eldred.
There is an opening here for challenging the first amendment problems underlying certain (some say) flawed provisions of the DMCA via the magic sentence of Eldred. I fear that these lawsuits may unintentionally close that opening by conflating first amendment concerns with public interest notice and length concerns. The First Amendment connection is simply too tenuous to be rescued by a single sentence in an opinion otherwise holding completely to the contrary.
-dh
“[The] conclusions [of the law and economics movement] will surprise advocates from both sides of this increasingly contentious debate.”
Looks like one side has overcome its surprise and gone filed a lawsuit. A question: Can a dust jacket blurb be redeemed for an amicus brief?
I’m waiting for some 3rd world country to tip the copyright renewal gold mine.
If, for example, Botswana required renewal of copyright every 5 years at, for example, $10,000 per renewal, I think that it would generate somewhere between 10 million and a billion dollars a year.
Imagine the fees paid for just the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Jefferson Airplaane, Jimi Hendrix, Janice Joplin, The Sex Pistols, The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Kinks, Pink Floyd, Elvis Presley, Motown, and Microsoft (which really does not want to compete against older versions of its applications and operating systems).
They’d get the money, because anyone could set up a server in Botswana, and distribute the stuff otherwise.
It would generate a lot of money, and with a 40% HIV infection rate, they need it.
Reading the document now, and don’t understand paragraph #82. It says this follows by implication from 81. This seems to have this form:
if not A, then not B.
A
——–
therefore B
this isn’t a valid argument form, though.
“should be necessary” isn’t a conclusion that I see can be drawn here.
lawrence, being an appeasing european and all, i am not sure i get why that is well-done.
this is soo much better!
I read the FAQ and saw that the gist of this suit is to ask for a return to some implementation of ‘formalities’ akin to the pre-1976 act and/or pre-BERNE Convention, specifically, registration and renewals. What really gets me is one particular ramification if this were to come to pass:
Would each release of a computer program need to be re-registered?
This would certainly negatively impact much GPL’ed code out there. All the benefits from the open source model of “release early, release often” could be lost, depending on how this return to formalities was implemented.
Am I missing something here?
tim
If unconditional copyright is declared unconstitutional, what would be the status of all the works published after 1976 that did not register their copyrights?
Matthew: Were Botwswana to do such a thing, they would not get lots of new income, they’d get bombed by the US for being a dangerous “pirate” nation.
I had Obama at U of C law school for voting rights. He is a very smart and decent man, and his primary campaign showed that he ain’t a half bad pol, either. I think I missed Prof. Lessig by a couple of years. Anyway, Obama will make waves at the national level, and rightly so.
Some other recent alums and I held a fundraiser for Obama in early March, with special guest Studs Terkel. Pictures can be found by clicking my name and scrolling down.
If by well done you mean half-baked, yes. And elliptical… and cringeworthy.
I believe by well-done Professor Lessig is referring to the “mash” of Austin Powers and the Kerry speeches, not the content itself. This, like most of the attack ads actually leaves me with a sense of “so what?” But at least this one is otherwise creative.
A parallell question to Mr. Cullen’s which may shed some light on the issue. Prior to 1976, did each issue of, say, a newspaper or magazine need to be separately registered for copyright, or was there some means by which they were exempted?
Responsing to Tim Cullen’s comment:
Why do you think that you should have free
ride to obtain limited monopoly in your
work including program? People needs to
know which work is copyrighted and which
work is in the public domain. It is your
responsibility to inform us that you want
to copyright your program. This means that
you have to pay the Copyright Office some
fee. (Very similar to patent and patent office.)
But, apparently you want to get limited
monopoply in your program for free (in
term of cost) rather than releasing your
program to the public domain where it can
be used freely (in term of freedom).
Joseph Pietro Riolo
<[email protected]>
Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions
in this comment in the public domain.
Which people? At the most, it’s this ad that’s hated. Although, hate is such a strong word. I have a hard time reading “hate” from the above posts.
Mr. Riolo:
My comment was just to point out the implications of a return to pre-1976 formalities, which seems to be what this complaint argues for, would mean for the open source community. All open source licenses rely to some degree on copyright as their leverage. If you violate the terms of the GPL, for example, you are liable for copyright infringement. The problem I speak about is this: if the requirement of registration returns, depending on how the copyright office implements it, it might create considerable administrative and financial overhead for open source projects that tend to release early and often (and thus causing such projects to lose the many benefits of such a release modality).
While I am certainly for restoring the Constitutionally mandated balance between progress for all and rewards for creators, a return to formalities is a decidedly problematic course to chart in pursuit of such a mission.
tim
I hope that this case can better avoid the “property word” trap. If it is perceived as “pro-property” vs “against-property” the scale will be tipped again from the beginning.
What needs to be clear is that the public domain is a legitimate owner of “intellectual property” and has a right to limit how much is given away and to recover it in due time. The fact that something belongs to the public does not make it less of a property right than the limited monopoly granted to an individual or entity. Taking away property from the public is as much of a “theft” as taking away property from an individual or entity. Public property is entrusted to the government who has a duty to exercise proper custody, with the Constitution establishing a guideline that it should only be given away for a limited time and for a specific purpose.
I hope this can be made clear and I never read in the news that “New breathing laws were just passed by congress. This is a great victory for the breathing air lobby. This lobby has been very active in their campaign to educate on the potentially huge financial gains that could be realized in the unexploited area of breathing air. A survey showed that the public is just interested on improving our economy and job creation and is convinced that these new laws will be helpful for these goals. One respondent noted: We should also educate other countries where breathing air is free that they are losing on the big benefits of paid air, free air is theft”.
Eusebio: I fear that the language trap is already closing on those who want a more reasonable copyright regime–the wording in the websites discussing the case now talk about “copyright protection”, as if a copyrighted work comes to some kind of harm when it is performed, copied, built upon in a derivative work, or used in a regulated way without permission from the copyright holder. Particularly with this case, which seems focused on making available commercially unavailable works (so-called “orphaned” works), it’s important to convey that no such harm exists thus there is no need for talking about “protection”.
By keeping these works locked up the copyright holder apparently makes no money and the copyright holder is apparently unwilling to spend the money to return these works to publication. The market has spoken and these works are not worth money as-is, even if they find an audience in the PD. We can’t afford to think of copyright as profit-protection (which is the real “protection” being referred to obliquely) or as copy prevention (which is a far more accurate phrasing of the intent behind so-called “copy protection”).
RMS routinely points out the biases in people’s thinking by debunking the myths in their speech. Listen to the talks at gnu.org/philosophy/ and you’ll hear him correct people who say something that doesn’t accurately represent the situation at hand (typically associating him with the open source movement which he has nothing to do with, or talking about “intellectual property” which is a prejudicial catch-all phrase that erroneously blurs copyright, trademark, patent, and other areas of law more murky than clear). I highly recommend reading http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html for a great series of short explanations on why to avoid these and other phrases.
While I agree with Mr. Riolo that a copyright extension fee applied to software may be useful to clarify what software is copyrighted and to extend the availability of software to everyone (such as making GPL-licensed software fall into public domain, allowing such software to be incorporated into proprietary works), I’m worried that such a fee would expose authors to liability claims.
Consider that most Open Source licenses also include a warranty disclaimer. For licenses such as the modern (one- or two-clause) BSD license or the X11 or MIT licenses, the warranty disclaimer (and the gaurantee that the warranty disclaimer must remain attached to the software) is the only license provision that differentiates the software from public domain.
If software falls into public domain without copyright extension formalities, this may expose the author to the product liability claims that the BSD/X11/MIT licenses attempt to disclaim. Even if the extension fee is minimal, it imposes an undue burden upon the author because (1) the author generally makes no money from such software and (2) the fee is recurring throughout the author’s lifetime. With other media (books, etc.), the fee will only be paid as long as the work is profitable to the copyright holder; with proprietary software (and other media), this fee can come out of the revenue gained from the work, but it would come out-of-pocket for authors of most BSD/X11/MIT-licensed software.
If we charge a fee of, say, $30, per copyright extension, this imposes an actual financial burden upon authors who have released dozens of software packages. Rather than encouraging authors to release works for public benefit, an extension fee would discourage authors from making works publically available in the first place.
I do not know whether anyone has successfully won a lawsuit against an author of public domain software, but the fact that large organizations (such as MIT or the University of California) choose these licenses in lieu of placing software in the public domain leads me to believe that placing software in the public domain is dangerous. Indeed, this has been discussed before on the
opensource.org mailing lists.
“Well-done” in what sense?
Well-done in that it demonstrates some basic video and sound editing skills? Well done in that it teases Kerry for his blunder of quoting unnamed foreigners while borrowing style and narrative elements from a feature created by a foreigner (or a one-man band of foreigness–Mike Myers being not only Canadian but British thanks to his immigrant parents)? Well-done in that it demonstrates that even the Grand Old Party has assimilated the “throw it against the fan, run it up the flagpole and see if the chickens roost” attitude toward political productions circulating in cyberspace?
If a vote is to be taken, mark my ballot “Inadequate,” as in unfunny (criminally so) and empty.
So, character assassination based on what a guy talked about once to supporters is reason to get excited? Don’t you think the Republicans are going too far with it all, considering they cry fowl at even the most even-handed acusations from the other side.
Oh, wait, is it well done because it pirates media from other people?
OK, I give up, what’s the 20% rule?
Is the public domain so open to lawsuits? If somoene was walking through a public land, tripped, and died as a result of their fall, can they sue the rangers/government for allowing the fall? Is there an exemption that applies to public lands, or can one be created that would apply to publicly-owned goods?
Regarding fees and “release early and often”: updates would tend to be derivative works sanctioned by the “copyright owner” and might not fall into the public domain as easily as you might think.
Who do they need approval from in order to run this kind of thing? Can they just do it themselves, as a satire (or was it fair use?) like with the Mastercard… Priceless ads? Or did this mean that the movie company and/or Mike Myers supported the RNC’s position?
this.
I don’t know the answer to that either Richard, but check this out:
http://www.duluthsuperior.com/mld/duluthsuperior/news/8254366.html
Bruce, you are a cynic.
You’re probably right, that we’d bomb them, but you are a cynic.
Is it my imagination, or are recreating the Chinese Opium wars with trade in general and IP in particular?
Why arn’t Lessig’s books released under a Creative Commons license?
Responsing to Tim Cullen’s comment dated
March 23, 2004 at 6:34pm:
I can see how you see formalities as a
problem for the open source community.
My contention is that you see formalities
as a problem while I see them as a fair
way to gain limited monopoly that lasts
for a very long time (more than 70 years).
I think that you are spoiled by the current
copyright law that anything that you see
as a burden is labeled as a problem for you.
There are two ways to get around the
“problem” as you see it. One way is not
to release new changes too often. Second
way is to take advantage of the grace
period. I don’t have the old copyright
law with me but if I recall correctly,
the grace period is three months after
you make your program available to the
public. In this way, you can consolidate
all changes within three months and
register all of them as a unit for
copyright.
Still, if you don’t like formalities,
you should write a letter to Professor
Lessig asking him to drop the court case.
(I am playing devil’s advocate here.)
It is incorrect to say that a person
who violates GPL also infringes copyright
because not every violation of GPL is
also a violation of the copyright law
and vice versa.
Responding to Alex Hioreanu’s comment:
There are some misunderstandings about the
relationship between liability and copyright
(and public domain) that they become a myth.
There is no direct relationship between
liability and copyright. The fact that a
work has copyright has no affect on the
liability issues. So are the public domain
works.
The public domain works can include
warranty disclaimer if the distributors
of these works want to. Project Gutenberg
is a good example. This is not anything
different from works that have copyright
and include warranty disclaimer.
The reason why these large organizations
such as MIT or the University of California
don’t want to dedicate their software to
the public domain is that they want to
retain control over their software. This
has nothing to do with liability issues.
The people in the community want to have
complete control over their works so that
they can enforce terms and conditions of
open licenses on people. Without control
(by dedicating software to the public
domain), open licenses are meaningless.
Joseph Pietro Riolo
<[email protected]>
Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions
in this comment in the public domain.
Has anyone created alternate format versions of the book yet? One of the great things about Cory’s books is how many formats you can download them in, to suit whatever environment you want to read them in.
Versions of this book suitable for mobile devices would be most handy
The link to the PDF version is 404. Did the publisher get cold feet? =^)
Okay, I just had to mention this. The subtitle to “Free Culture” is “How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Creativity.” However, the freely downloadable version is a PDF. Does anybody else find this ironical? Was this intentional?
Very cool! Thanks!
I was hoping you would do this. Any chance of your old books being released under a creative commons license as well?
Congratulations!
We’ll be purchasing Free Culture!
If you have a magnet-enabled P2P client installed (i.e. LimeWire) you can also get it here.
However, the freely downloadable version is a PDF. Does anybody else find this ironical?
Did you even glance at the license? Or does putting “This PDF version” before the license exploit some loophole I’m unaware of?
freeculture.txt
(Not optimized for anything, it’s just a save of the PDF)
JP – He just released a free, online, complete version of the book (pdf) with a creative commons license and just posted the URL to download it from. http://www.free-culture.cc/freecontent
Lessig is no hypocrite.
Blogged your download (and your no 2 rank on Technorati’s most linked to books), after which John Morse noted this in comments:
Hm. The 2nd page of the PDF tells us about the lovely Creative Commons license, and then the copyright page (7 on the PDF) says “All Rights Reserved” and has a longish bit about not reproducing, storing, introducing into a retrieval system, transmitting, in any form or by any means without written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher and that scanning, uploading, and distributing the book via the internet or any other means without permission is illegal and punishable by law. Penguin encourages you to support the author’s rights.
Any thoughts? It’s in the version I just downloaded. Tx
What’s the problem? It says you cannot do these things without “without written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher.” We have this written permission in the form of the CC license.
You and I may know that the CC license stands, but if people send the pdf around with the “all rights reserved” language, it will get disconnected from the CC language where blogs including this one have linked the two together. If someone wanted to copy it for a class, they may think their behavior is not allowed even though it is according to the CC license. If they buy the book, my understanding is that the CC license still stands (though it’s not yet in the CC database so I can’t find the dated listing linking book and license). A hard copy owner or borrower won’t likely see the new license, and yet the All Rights Reserved conflicts with the message of the book. Part of the value of the CC licensing program is that these things are connected in human and machine language, and I think it makes sense to change it in the pdf and bitorrent versions so that it’s correct for those that don’t know about this stuff. Plus it promotes CC more. I really think it’s worth doing to get the complete message out there.
to Curtis: PDF is an open-standard, it may be Adobe’s, but it is open… here’s the spec.
I’d also be interested in Larry’s response to Mary’s query (say that ten times).
This is great to hear….it’s actually the question I wanted to ask the other day when you appeared on Talk of The Nation.
Nick Burch brought up a good point though… Cory’s works are available in a wonderful variety of formats. Additionally they are available all in one location, which makes findnig the different formats very easy. The CC license allows for derivative works, so we’re certainly free to make new formatted versions (time to break out Acrobat and Metapad for some html editing), but having an area available to add new versions on the main site would be most helpful to others looking for different formats.
I just want to say thank you for making it available not only as a direct download but as a .torrent as well. It was the impetus I’ve needed to check out this technology, and I’ve already shared nearly six times the bandwidth I used in downloading it this aftenroon. I’m going to leave it up all night as well.
Actually, Disney does not pay if it doesn’t suit them. Or more properly, they don’t care about ‘intellectual property’ if it isn’t convenient to corporate goals. Check out The Lion King then compare to Kimba the White Lion, a Japanese cartoon series from the 1960s. The Disney corp made an effort to acquire the rights, yes, but when they failed they went ahead and produced the movie. Apparently Disney corporate profits are more important than ‘respect for intellectual property’. The Japanese owners of the copyright were too polite to sue.
Go to http://www.kimbawlion.com/ and click the “Lion King?” button in the navigation frame.
So how is this any different from P2Per’s downloading their favorite songs across the net? Oh! I know, the P2Pers aren’t making any PROFIT from it. They are just enjoying the music and movies. Disney, on the other hand, is a PIRATE CORPORATION that has exploited ‘intellectual property’ that they did not own the rights to.
Question, does Lessig know about this? Is it in the book?
Here’s a quick version of Free Culture in html. It is somewhat lacking in the sense that it is a fairly straight copy of the pdf, but it is at least readable (I am at page 147 as I write) and most of the formating is intact. More work certainly needs to be done for a quality conversion.
Hm. The book says in it:
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
I am rather close to removing the html version from the internet that I uploaded earlier.
I somehow ended up forgoing studying for midterms today in favor of reading this–much enjoyed this really terrific work. Thanks so much for both your work on the issue and for providing it with the CC licence!
Mr Riolo,
My specific concern is that the author of an uncopyrighted program cannot guarantee that the users of his program have seen a warranty disclaimer. To make this link explicit: in the case of the BSD/X11/MIT licenses, the link between liability and copyright is that copyright ensures that the liability disclaimer must remain with the work.
As an example, suppose I write a program and allow its distribution along with a BSD/X11/MIT liability disclaimer protected in the tradiational manner through copyright. Under the current interpretation of copyright, I can feel secure that anyone who obtains my program within my lifetime obtains with it a liability disclaimer since, under the provisions of the license, the program cannot be distributed without the copyright notice and liability disclaimer. Furthermore, I can feel secure that anyone who uses my program (or incorporates its code, etc.), has read the license and liability disclaimer since the only rights to use the copyrighted program are granted by the license.
Under the proposed ruling, my program can fall out of copyright within my lifetime. When this happens, anyone is free to distribute the program without the liability disclaimer attached and I can therefore no longer feel secure that anyone who has obtained the program has read the liability disclaimer.
I understand that product liability law varies by the states and that in some jurisdictions it is only necessary to demonstrate that the consumer’s expectation of the product differs from the product’s performance. Without copyright protection, I can no longer feel safe that the user of the program understood that the program had no explicit purpose or that the distributor of the program understood that the program was not fit for sale, so I may not have these defenses at my disposal should someone bring suit against me. If legal counsel could assure me that I can no longer be held liable for my public domain software once someone separates it from its liability disclaimer, then I would feel safe having software in the public domain; otherwise, I would prefer either keeping the protections that copyright currently grants me or ensuring that the software is not available to anyone at all. Unfortunately, the latter is not an option for software already released under MIT/X11/BSD licenses since these licenses are generally held to be non-revokable.
While I can see that Project Gutenberg attaches a liability disclaimer to their works, I also see that they attempt to protect this liability disclaimer with a registered trademark. Specifically, their disclaimer specifies that either all references to Project Gutenberg must be removed from distributed copies of the work or that the “small print!” section must remain in its entirety. Why did they feel it necessary to protect their liability disclaimer through this separate intellectual property claim? This method of protection is not applicable to many software projects.
Regarding this trademark protection, I have to ask, what was Project Gutenberg afraid of? Why should I not be afraid of the same thing? How can I attain what they believed a reasonable level of protection if my software goes into the public domain?
On a separate issue, I would also disagree with your claim that MIT and the University of California wrote their licenses to control the distribution of their software. The software community at large generally holds the opposite view and indeed has observed a number of high-profile circumstances where such software was adopted in a way the copyright holders did not approve of (Microsoft’s subversion of MIT Kerberos, X11R6.4 licensing fees). I would ask that you base such accusations against these software authors on more than reputed knowlege of their intentions; for example, you could demonstrate in what ways (other than the single obvious restriction) this license is more limiting than public domain.
Josh: The PDF version from which you created your HTML is, because of the CC license, an “authorized electronic edition” and, because of the sharing provisions of same license, not “electronic piracy”. Had you scanned a print copy and made that available on the net, it might be a different story.
I’m sure this is just Penguin’s standard rights language, but if you think about it, there’s good reason (from their point of view, and even from the Prof’s) to insist on it.
This whole method of distribution is very much an experiment, remember. Based on the numbers from the Legal Torrents tracker and the direct download numbers at the free-culture.org host, everyone will have a fairly good idea of how many copies of the PDF have been distributed. If people were to digitize the hardcover and pass that around, though, it would essentially wreck the control group.
Larry I think you missed the point of your own book. Why don’t you remove the Restrictive copyright from the download version of the book. “That’s pretty easy”
By keeping this ‘restrictive’ copyright licensee in ,it’s hard for normal non-lawyer folk to take the Creative Commons license or you seriously.
You should start practicing what you preach.
Responsing to Alex Hioreanu’s comment:
Let me present two different scenarios.
Scenario #1:
Person A writes a program and dedicates
it to the public domain. Also, he or she
includes the disclaimer in the program.
He makes it available to the public.
Person B sees Person A’s program and copies
it including the disclaimer. He likewise
makes it available to the public on his
own server.
Person C sees Person A’s program on
Person B’s server. Person C copies it
but deletes the disclaimer that comes
with it. Person C makes his truncated
program available to the public on his
server.
Person D sees Person C’s truncated
program and copies it to his PC. He
runs it and somehow, it ruins one
of his important files.
What can Person D do? He can make
Person C liable for defect in his
truncated program.
Can Person D sue Person A? Although
Person D can sue Person A, court will
dismiss lawsuit because there is no
direct relationship between Person D
and Person A. Also, Person A isn’t
responsible for the actions done by
other people.
Scenario #2:
Person R writes a program and decides
to retain copyright in it. Also, he
includes the disclaimer in the program.
He makes it available to the public
with the condition that the disclaimer
must goes with the copyrighted program.
Person S sees Person R’s program and copies
it including the disclaimer as per the
agreement. He likewise makes it available
to the public on his own server.
Person T sees Person R’s program on
Person S’s server. Person T copies it
but deletes the disclaimer that comes
with it. Person T makes his truncated
program available to the public on his
server.
Person U sees Person T’s truncated
program and copies it to his PC. He
runs it and somehow, it runs one of his
important files.
What can Person U do? He can make
Person T liable for defect in his
truncated program.
Can Person U sue Person R? Although
Person U can sue Person R, court will
dismiss lawsuit because there is no
direct relationship between Person U
and Person R. Also, Person R isn’t
responsible for the actions done by
other people.
Although the two scenarios are very
similar regardless of whether a
program has copyright, there is
one important difference. Person
R in second scenario can sue Person
T for violating the agreement. It
is possible that Person R can sue
Person T for violating Person R’s
copyright but that is not very likely.
On the other hand, Person A in the
first scenario can’t do anything
with Person C because there is no
ground for lawsuit.
I mentioned Project Gutenberg as
an example because it showed that
the liability issues have nothing
to do with copyright. Even if
there is no claim for trademark
in a public domain work, Project
Gutenberg can always include
disclaimer if it wants to.
You asked me what is the difference
between MIT’s open license and the
public domain. Although MIT’s open
license is more liberal than many
other open licenses, there is still
one difference between MIT’s open
license and the public domain.
That difference is the ownership.
MIT’s open license still retains
the ownership in its works while
the public domain disclaims the
ownership in its works.
If you think that this is immaterial,
think of ownership as proprietary.
Also, think of ownership as a set of
legal rights. The public domain don’t
have any of them. The fact that MIT
wants to retain proprietary/ownership
in its works speaks for itself.
Joseph Pietro Riolo
<[email protected]>
Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions
in this comment in the public domain.
Page 27: “Is it not about the ‘centrality of technology’ to ordinary life.”
Did you mean, “it is not”?
jaa jaa- a notable difference between the two “attack ad” styles is that the Kerry video consists of “sound nibbles” (apparently a full “bite” is not permitted) – snippets constantly cut and framed by commentary & music; whereas the Rummie episode is uncommented and unadorned.
Joe: No, PDF is not “an open standard.” It is published and the specs are currently available online, but Adobe has full control over it and can change it at any time and make the specs unavailable.
I wasn’t necessarily criticizing the use of PDF — a lot of people use it, and that’s great. I just thought it was ironic that a book on “Free Culture” was made available only in a proprietary format created by a company known (and exampled in said book) to use the law to stifle innovation. I actually wondered if perhaps the use of PDF had been something of a wry joke. Apparently, though, it wasn’t.
I’ve made “Free Culture” available as a PostScript document.
I used GNU Ghostscript‘s pdf2ps.
The file is here: freeculture.ps.bz2.
It clocks in at about 8MB, compressed.
The book is great, PDF is a convenient format for me and thankyou!
I read that quote on the subway this morning, and nearly sprayed my coffee across the people around me. Later in the same article, is this paragraph:
I realize we all are fairly certain that we can recall this happening, but can anyone provide some solid references? Bonus points if it’s actually a reference to Bob Goodlatte.
No bonus points for me, but: Cuba and genetically modified foods come to mind pretty quickly.
The US is pressurising Australia to extend copyright protection retrospectively – a la Sonny Bono copyright act – from 50 years to 90 years.
Project Gutenberg Australia had started making stuff over 50 years old available for free download. Now it looks like it will have to take it all down. Get ’em while you can at http://gutenberg.net.au/plusfifty.html
Ooops. When I say “Get ’em while you can” I of course mean “Get ’em while you can if you are not from the USA”. It would be illegal under Sonny Bono for USAns to see this stuff.
Goodlatte’s Virginia district has no film or music comapnies, yet he is amongst the highest paid recipienets of Hollywood lobbyists money. Once again, this last election, he had no opponent, even after he promised he was retiring.
He has made it his priority to be the founding father of the House Caucus on Anti-Piracy, although such interests have no effect on devastating poverty and hunger in our district due to outsourced jobs in the textile industry. (And last week’s closing of major employer Home Shopping Network—moved to Florida.)
Nor does carrying water for Valenti and Eisner prove to be any benefit to our other industries: agriculture, coal, tobacco, tourism and railroad constituents.
Australia’s citizens should fight the extention of copyright past the current 50 years. Anyone have any links or information on this issue?
I should also have noted that economist blogger John Quiggin has also been vocal on the copyright term extension issue, see for example his post here.
Can you, professor, or anyone other friendly readers here suggest some books one might read to learn more about arguments on free trade and the WTO?
Blosxom and Unison. Who needs a gui?
Perhaps Baker is missing the point. He seems mystified that the republicans aren’t attacking this “one special interest that Republican strategists should love attacking.” He’s trying to apply logic to a political situation.
The point is, this issue is about control. There is nothing that the Corporate Right likes quite as much as control. This is why the current administration, owned by the Corporate Right as it is, has not made a move to change the current IP situation. To do so would be to relinquish some level of control that the corporations imagine they have over consumers.
Here is a link to the WSJ review that will stay live for 7 days.
As a physician interested in public health I would be curious to hear your thoughts on how intellectual property rights could impact the healthcare industry. Recently, the SF Chronicle had a small article on Clayton Christensen. He was paraphrased as saying that health care is an industry in dire need of a disruptive technology. I think many people would agree with his observation.
Do you have thoughts on how the creative commons license could be used to further the goals of public health initiatives.
Thank you.
As someone who does know how elections are won, Kerry is way behind Bush in money and local organizations in swing states. At this point in time, I don’t see how Kerry wins.
As for the free culture issues you care about professor, neither candidate has positions you would support. Hmmmmm. If there was a nationally-recognized “free culture” organization (I suppose there are a few smaller orgs that would count like EFF) I wonder who would get their endorsement?
On free trade & the WTO, I like “The Regulation of International Trade” by Trebilcock and Howse, published by Routledge.
The thought crossed my mind to pass the text into a text-to-speech program and put on my headphones. This is even better!
Mr. Obama should read this opinion piece at Black Commentator.
Good luck to him!
Is that the same Stewart Baker who was general counsel of the NSA under Clinton? I wonder if he’s being facetious with that conservative argument.
The Blackmask html conversion (in the .zip file) seems nicer than Josh’s, though both of them are fairly direct conversions from the pdf file. Doing a really nice version is going to take some manual cleanup, for example, fixing words that are broken by hyphenation in the pdf. Easiest would be if Larry could make his original word processing file available. Any chance?
My only comment would be that it is very early to calling the election. I grew up watching Kerry win races he wasn’t supposed to, which I would attribute to his ability to make adjustments. Much like a batter at the plate, he seems to change his gameplan to what he is being pitched. Sure that invites the old flip-flopper with no conviction critique, but having an idealogue in the Oval Office hasn’t really been effective. I think the reason you have been solicited to contribute to Kerry’s campaign is not that his organization is so together, it’s that there is a serious fear of Bush for 4 more years, and that is all that Kerry needs to tap into.
There is also a version in Plucker format, my favourite reader for PalmOS:.
The plain text file on my site (and many of the other direct conversions of the pdf) are quite unfit for consumption. I’m fixing it manually right now; will probably be done within the weekend. After that making a semantically yummy HTML document will be trivial.
Thus, Larry, any tranlsation to this work is allowed?
The claim in chapter 4 that recording artists don’t get any royalties from radio broadcasts surprises me. Does that mean my local classical radio station can broadcast Yo-Yo Ma’s CBS Masterworks CD of the Bach cello suites without having to pay anything to CBS? I’m astounded if the record labels permit anything like that to happen.
Plenty of conservatives hate Bush’s radical agenda, too. There have been numerous defections, only the most recent being Richard Clarke’s. If you don’t trust Clarke, by all means, corroborate his story with Paul O’Neil’s. On the Iraq war, add Anthony Zinni and Scott Ritter — both Bush supporters in 2000 — to the list of dissenters…
Check out this quote from former Secretary of the Navy and conservative Republican James Webb:
“There is no historical precedent for taking such
action [against Iraq] when our country was not being
directly threatened. The reckless course that Bush
and his advisers have set will affect the economic and
military energy of our nation for decades. It is only
the tactical competence of our military that, to this
point, has protected him from the harsh judgment he
deserves.
“At the same time, those around Bush, many of whom
came of age during Vietnam and almost none of whom
served, have attempted to assassinate the character
and insult the patriotism of anyone who disagrees with
them. Some have impugned the culture, history and
integrity of entire nations, particularly in Europe,
that have been our country’s great friends for
generations and, in some cases, for centuries.”
Sucking up to “Big Copyright” and fucking American citizens’ fair use rights is a bipartisan affair. Every evil copyright law, such as the DMCA and the just-proposed “PIRATE Act” is sponsored by one republican and one democrat.
Replies:
(1) A noncommercial translation is as permitted as an audio version.
(2) I don’t have a source file. The original that I sent got edited.
(3) Record labels want to sell records. Free radio does that.
I was interested in reading a chapter until I saw that they had all already been snapped up… It’s great to see people so excited about the book!
As Ed Lyons pointed out in his comment above, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans support freedom, as such – they both support bigger and bigger government. For instance, the new PIRATE Act is being co-sponsored by Patrick Leahy, the ranking Democrat, who is just as much in the record industries pocket as Orrin Hatch, the other co-sponsor, and it so happens that many Democrats voted for the Patriot Act, the War Powers Act, etc. For my part, I think we should elect Michael Badnarik, because a vote for a third party is NOT a wasted vote. A wasted vote is what happens when you vote for the lesser of two evils.
Misleading article in one way:
“Voters under 40” are not a “generation”.
The Republican group is 30-40; the group from 18-30 is quite sharply anti-Republican.
Why?…
>?Big Copyright,? he continues, ?is one special interest
>that Republican strategists should love attacking.?
The current Republicans are pro-Big Everything, and against any sort of caps on anything done by big business. There’s not a chance in hell that they’ll actually make the proposal suggested in this article.
Joseph Pietro Riolo has it exactly right: if your work is in the public domain, you are no more responsible for people ignoring or stripping off your warranty disclaimer than you are if it’s copyrighted.
Implied warranties come with *distribution*, not with authorship. If all the copies *you* distribute have a warranty disclaimer, it is not your problem if someone else removes it — you cannot be sued on the basis of the warranty that you disclaimed (unless the warranty is non-disclaimable, of course). (The person who distributed it without the disclaimer, however, could be.)
This does not differ whether the work you distribute is in the public domain, is copyrighted by you, or is copyrighted by someone else.
This case has a practical advantage over Eldred: it’s presenting immediate, specific harm to the “progress of science”, in a situation where nobody else benefits — abandoned works. With a good litigator, the courts will see that this is a very real immediate harm, which they apparently didn’t notice in Eldred.
I dunno… Why not read a chapter anyway? What’ll it cost you? The same it would’ve if the rest hadn’t been read. Perhaps people will find your accent/reading style/recording environment better… Like Lessig said, perhaps even competition between versions.
Next on the list: Redevelop it as a doco (Flash-based, probably). This would obviously be somewhat different from the original…
Aw, I want to read a chapter now. But somehow I don’t think a male American professor read in the voice of an Australian chick will necessarily go down well.
Raena Armitage
I don’t see why. Even if I am fooled into thinking that the American males’ voices are that of Lessig, I’m not sure that it would be a good thing.
Anyway, only the reader has to like it. It’s just a bonus if someone enjoys listening.
Tim Ivorson
“Basic corruption of the government” is a good concept. Unfortunately, on a basic philosophical level Democrats like the government more than Republicans. Democrats are also more prone to demagoguery (which is not to imply that the Republicans aren’t — all politicians are demagogues, more or less).
I definitely don’t trust a Democrat, especially an inside-the-Beltway one, to deal with the corruption of basic integrity in the government…
Actually, I don’t see anyone capable of doing this — anyone that has a slightest chance of being elected, that is. Maybe the next generation.
And with this we conclude our pessimistic message of the day 🙂
Kaa
>>The point is, this issue is about control. There is nothing that the Corporate Right likes quite as much as control.
You are not saying that the MPAA/RIAA orgs are Right Wing are you? It seems to me that they are more Left than Rush Limbaugh is Right. And they are the ones that want complete control of everything you hear, see, and read.
Don’t misconstrue my comment – the “Right” is just as guilty, they just go about it by eliminating regulation instead of adding regulation. This allows the corporate entities to charge/change what they want.
Very cool… I do have a question that has hit me smack dab in the forehead and Im not done with the book. In Chapter Six you quote
“Parliament rejected their requests. As one pamphleteer put it, in words that echo today,
I see no Reason for granting a further Term now, which will not hold as well for granting it again and again, as often as the Old ones Expire; so that should this Bill pass, it will in Effect be establishing a perpetual Monopoly, a Thing deservedly odious in the Eye of the Law; it will be a great Cramp to Trade, a Discouragement to Learning, no Benefit to the Authors, but a general Tax on the Publick; and all this only to increase the private Gain of the Booksellers.5″
Why has no one used this type of passage and changed it to the context of today? Does this not exactly state why copyrights should be left at a set term without continually being revisited and pushed out?
Comparto la opini�n de Brian, la edici�n electr�nica del libro Cultura Libre es n�tida. Agradecemos al Profesor Lessig por su obra y en especial por poner a nuestra disposici�n su �ltimo libro de forma que podamos leerlo, discutirlo, comentarlo y exponerlo en Ecuador – Am�rica del Sur.
We shouldn’t be so limited appyling freedom to our lives. Bush’s tax cut has provided average citizens more freedom to decide how we want to spend our money. It will have the bonus side effect of putting pressure on government to control the amount of money it consumes, I’m glad there’s a deficit that will give our government more pause before dumping our money into the next “big solution.”
The fact is, as others have said, there is not a big difference between the Republicans and the Democrats right now any most freedom-related concerns. If we continue to demand more freedom to keep the income we earn, and government continues to shrink and exercise a less intrusive impact on our lives many of the freedom infringing policies supported by both parties will be forced to the wayside by a lack of capacity to enforce them. We can best disarm our government’s intrusion in our lives by taking away the resources it uses to invade our lives not by creating “feel-good” policy pronouncements that will be ignored when expedient. Starve the government of $ and there simply will be less people to ignore privacy.
The internet is such a nice place, even though I know very little spanish, I went to http://world.altavista.com/ and entered Diego’s text, it translated it for me to about what I thought it was. Just another example of how technology helps us all, or atleast me.
A Foreigner said:
The U.S. does indeed stand for certain principles. What you failed to understand in your early life was that those principles are incredibly self-centered. Ever since its establishment, the United States has not cared if the rest of the world went to hell in a handbasket as long as it didn’t affect its own interests. The Iraq invasion was not undertaken to liberate the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein; that was just a consequence. It was a war of revenge and (officially) prevention. Korea and Vietnam were not fought out of a deep concern over the welfare of their peoples under Communism. We didn’t really get involved in WWII until we were attacked ourselves. We didn’t get into WWI until the Zimmerman Telegram threatened to bring the war to U.S. soil. We fought the Spanish-American War and the Mexican War to expand our territory. Similarly the War of 1812 was a land-grab at Canada while Britain was supposedly distracted by Napoleon. And that’s just our military history; I can’t imagine how much of our economic history is littered with such examples. America is a young nation and we are a nation of adolescents, seeking immediate gratification and little caring about the long-term consequences of our actions.
So our recent foreign policy is merely more of the same. Under Democratic administrations it is usually a little less overtly self-centered, but nevertheless we are basically unconcerned about what the rest of the world does as long as it doesn’t directly affect us. And now that there is no longer any military or (apparently) economic rival to force us to take their positions seriously, we are doing whatever suits our fancy. This helps messianic lunatics like Bin Laden promote their own agendas, and the cycle becomes self-sustaining: 1) Bin Laden sets up 9/11 -> 2) we bomb Bin Laden out of Afghanistan because he’s behind 9/11 -> 3) Bin Laden recruits terrorists opposed to our bombing them and bombs Madrid -> 4) See what a threat Bin Laden is, we better bomb him. Ad infinitum. There is no incentive to stop the cycle, because that’s “giving in to the terrorists” and heaven knows we can’t do that.
The problem with Kerry’s candidacy is that the kind of people who might support him are less likely to vote than those who might support Bush. Kerry doesn’t inspire me, he doesn’t have the fire of Dean or the optimism and charisma of Edwards. He’s just kind of *there*, the alternative to Bush, and I’ll support him on that basis; but the large percentage of Americans who don’t really care about politics won’t be moved by him. That leaves the activist Conservatives vs. the activist Liberals, and ties go to the incumbent (and the big money).
Diego says (my own Chicano translation)… “I share Brian’s opinion, the electronic edition of ‘Free Culture’ is crisp (sharp, clear). We thank Professor Lessig for his work and especially for making his latest book available, in a form that we can read, discuss, comment and expand upon en Ecuador – South America.”
Shirley you can’t be serious. “Average citizens” got a pittance, per capita, compared to the per capita benefits given the wealthiest Americans. There’s been so much spin on how really the majority of benefit went to the poorest Americans in overall terms that my head is swimming. You know, 100 million Americans getting $10 back is comparable to 100 Americans getting $10 million back! I feel so much better when I think of it like that. Puh-leese. And I see no evidence of THIS government controlling the amount of money it consumes, in fact I see just the OPPOSITE. Oh, I get it, you were talking about our KIDS’ government having to be careful in its spending. We’ll all be safely dead by then so who cares, right? Deficits don’t matter…to us!
Like missions to Mars. Or No Child Left Behind. Or Healthy Forests. Or Clear Skies. Or Medicare drug benefits. Or PATRIOT II and III. Yes, we ought not to be seeing those kinds of feel-good pronouncements, unfunded mandates and intrusions into our lives any more. I’m with you there!
But surely you’re not proposing that we cut Defense, Homeland Security, FBI and CIA budgets? No, that would be Un-American. So we’ll just cut everything else instead (Interior which is just a bunch of tree-huggers, HHS and HUD which just subsidize welfare cheats, Labor which is a shill for unions, etc.). Unfortunately for your theory, Defense, Homeland Security and the FBI are the biggest sources of privacy ignoring out there, so that ain’t gonna work. Next.
Dr. Lessig,
Your lack of blind enthusiasm for the de facto nominee of the Democratic party might cost him some votes, thus keeping Bush in the White House.
Don’t say anything to detract from Kerry – you’ll be like Ralph Nader!
Bush vs. Gore – neither had been president before. But now, we’ve seen GWB in action. This can be used by either side. Either the good or bad could be highlighted and then – “if you like things this way, vote for the incumbent.”
The only problem with Kerry using this is that it could be seen as “mudslinging.” Its nothing new. Maybe try a different tactic – and highlight on the tactic itself. Don’t resort to mudslinging and highlight “your issues.” Also, highlight the fact you are not mudslinging.
Kerry’s campaign could use the “who have we become” or “burden our children” messages without explicitly pointing fingers at GWB.
The way campaigns are won: Its a popularity contest. “The issues” are just something to talk about until you come up with a catch phrase like “where’s the beef”, “read my lips”, or “I feel your pain”. The voting public has a short attention span so the scandal/issue of the immediate past is all that really matters. If you mention “tax cut” the voting public sees a lollipop and doesn’t think about the consequences. In short, the voting public is a cross between a gossiping housewife and a 5 year old.
I don’t know about Yoyo Ma, but I have heard directly from many cover artists (ie swing-era jazz, early jugband/blues) who tell of zero royalties from airplay; airplay is covetted only to sell tickets or CDs.
And it gets worse: The law only considers “composition” in the white-European church-music tradition — Jerome Kern’s estate received the full royalties for John Coltrane’s “My Favourite Things” because free-jazz improvisation (the larger share of the recording timewise) is not recognized as “composition”.
This is also why new pop-artists are cajoled into flooding the market with “original” songs instead of the rich tradition of “versions” we see in every other genre on the planet: If you write your own songs, however badly, you get airplay money, if you don’t you don’t, and thus the kids are left to continually re-invent musical culture in a clean-room environment.
But to get back on topic, add my vote to the request to release your original word-processor files, or perhaps a text dump done from the original source; we can do best justice to your work when the signal:noise is highest 🙂
Conservatives respect property rights. Respecting property rights means accepting their limitations. Rights to real property stop at the property line. Unfortunately, powerful owners of IP, on both sides of the political divide, will use that power to overreach with their claims.
Part of the problem is the intellectual property bar, which is less concerned with the philosophy of intellectual property rights than whoring themselves out to the highest bidder. The whole issue of IP has become an arena where the threat of litigation is used to intimidate competitors and extend, in an extralegal manner, overreaching IP rights.
Last year I was the target of a claim by Chrysler that they had exclusive rights to the images of their cars and that I was not allowed to publish my original embroidery designs derived from those images. Since I can’t afford to litigate, I took a different tack to fight back. I told their licensing agency that I was compliant with Chrysler’s stated permission to use their own copyright images editorially (putting aside the obvious 1st Amendment and fair use implications). I successfully pitched the Detroit News to do a ‘big guy picking on little guy’ story (getting the DetNews to run it was important because it meant that the folks in Auburn Hills would be reading it). Most important, in the interview with the reporter I repeatedly raised the irony of a company that just paid $1 billion into a fund for compensating Jews used as slaves in the Holocaust going after an embroiderer who made Jewish ritual items and gifts. The story ran in the Sunday business section and the lead paragraph mentioned my Judaica and identified Chrysler as a subsidiary of “DaimlerChrysler AG”. I also raised this issue with their licensing agency and told them that I was perfectly willing to contact every Jewish newspaper in the United States with the story. Two days later they backed down.
Kerry has served in the US Senate for nearly two decades. How much has he “burdened our children” by the deficits of the 80’s and 90’s? Did he vote for the war in Iraq? Did he vote for the PATRIOT Act? blah blah blah blah.
How Kerry can cast blame and Bush when he has been part of the problem for almost two decades?
Of course, there will be those that will vote for the lesser of two evils, which leaves us with an evil in the White House.
I don’t believe the article is saying that the majority of “under 40s” are Republican only that more “under 40s” are Republican than in prior generations.
For example, if the split in the 1980’s was 70% Democrat and 30% Republican and the split in the 2000’s is 60% Democrat and 40% Republican, the “under 40s” would be MORE Republican now than they were in the 1980’s.
I sent an email before I realized I could post here. I’m just wondering if there are any plans on translating this book to Swedish.
I would not mind buying a number of copies in Swedish as gifts.
If there are no such plans, I could help, but translating the whole book by myself is too daunting a task for me right now.
>>Voters under 40 are already more Republican than any other generation.
If by “more Republican” he means “less Democratic” then perhaps this is accurate. Probably “more libertarian” (small “l”) would be a heck of a lot _more_ accurate.
As the mysterious child’s voice said to St. Augustine, “Tolle, lege; take, and read.” The more participants, the richer the venture for everyone involved.
And not every chapter has been recorded yet. . . .
Martin,
I’ve been toying with the idea of coordinating a collaborative wiki-based translation of the book to Danish. Maybe we could pool technical resources?
Guan
I’m in. I just have to figure out the technological aspects.
Lawrence,
Several of the recent posts here have provoked me to respond.
Why is it that you (and Stewart Baker, apparently) seem so surprised that it is the Republican Party that is likely to embrace your vision of Free Culture? It is, after all, simply the logical end that a truthful examination of what being a free-market, less-government, conservative brings about. Labels are so misleading. We should care little about whether this movement is called neo-conservatism, libertarianism, market-liberalism, or any other misleading tag chosen to describe it. Free Culture, like blogging itself, is about the exchange of ideas and the ability to create freely. It is the country in which we want to live.
It is this common thread of what we can be and should be espoused by people like you, Randy Barnett, Glenn Reynolds, Lawrence Solum, Steve Antler, Eugene Volokh, and many others that drive this examination of where we are truly heading. The truth is that people don’t understand intellectual property. Just the name puts people off. People don’t care about copyright law. Not yet. But what is done today stands to shape what will be the most important area of property law in this century. That is why the fight for the de-monopolization of thise ideas is so important.
Politicians will only talk about things that the electorate cares about. How many more lawsuits by the RIAA against college students will it take before enough people care about what it means to live in a corporately-owned culture? But Stewart Baker is right about which party will be most likely to rein in the abuse of copyrights and patents. It will not be a candidate who is, as you describe, “inside-the-beltway-tone-deaf.”
It wasn’t going to be Howard Dean, either.
Les
A format I’d love to see (not got the resources myself, hence this LazyWebbish post) would be one with publically editable margin notes / hooks in the text that could spawn discussion threads.
Clearly it would end up having a very different flavor to the current work, where a single author presents his carefully prepared argument, but that’s what transformative/derivative works are all about, right?
It seems an obvious extension of the kind of blog-enabled communal thinking people around these parts like to celebrate. Also I think it would be very cute to have a relative unique creation enabled by free culture actually be derived from Free Culture.
A simple but possibly sufficient implementation would be to use a Wiki together with a convention that one doesn’t edit Lessig’s original words directly.
> (2) I don�t have a source file. The original that I sent got edited.
um, _somebody_ has “the source file”. they made the .pdf with it.
i would very much like to make this an example-book for
a new e-book format/viewer combination i have developed.
(alongside the example i’m making of cory doctorow’s stuff.)
an .rtf version would facilitate this derivative use _greatly_…
-bowerbird
If Kerry fails to excite you, or rather perhaps you find yourself doubting the wisdom displayed by Democratic primary voters and caucus-goers, that which held that Kerry’s “electability” will win the day, then I think Dean takes a good turn at leading by example, suggesting by his actions that if Kerry’s not exciting enough, then you had better take the opportunity to go out and be exciting as his surrogate.
I won’t pretend I’m excited to vote for Kerry, but I am certainly excited about the opportunity to depose Bush. If your overriding concern is freedom, and you think that tax-cutting is an obvious corrollary to that end, and you therefore lean Republican, just consider: this administration has amply demonstrated its ruthless dishonesty, and, what with the Clarke business and all, it is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore or deny that. Government propaganda and disinformation deprive you of liberty just as much as facially repressive and paternalistic laws. If Bush’s tax-cutting is premised on a “starve the beast” strategery, then shouldn’t he disclose this? Rather, he defends his tax cuts (disproportionately distributed to the very wealthy) as a means of stimulating the economy. But this very rationale is contrary to a libertarian approach: why should the government be meddling with the private sector? What business is it of the federal government to poke the market with a stick (in the hopes that it will rebound in time to help him win the election)?
If it really were Bush’s position that “it’s your money, not the government’s,” then why doesn’t he propose repealing the 16th amendment? Instead, Bush wants to amend the Constitution to address a threat that apparently is as serious as all that egregious flag-burning that went on in the last decade: gay marriage. More government encroachment into your life. Think there’s no difference between Bush and Kerry on the freedom of our culture? Ask Howard Stern about Bush’s FCC.
> I won�t pretend I�m excited to vote for Kerry, but I am
> certainly excited about the opportunity to depose Bush.
Two problems.
First, if you look at Kerry’s record on issues such as personal privacy and copyright, you find that they aren’t so hot. Keep in mind that Clinton did serious damage to privacy while in office; it is often the Democrats who can be bullied into such actions to avoid seeming “weak” (on crime, terrorism, whatever).
Second, whoever wins the election will have to deal with the situation in Iraq. It won’t just go away on November 5th. We are hearing a lot about what Kerry thinks is wrong, but what DOES he plan to DO in Iraq? I haven’t heard anything anywhere near convincing so far.
Cranky
Any link to Vint’s paper?
Bowerbird:
I’m almost done with a proper plaintext version (with markup delimited with special characters–the only real thing is italicizing and dashes–so formatting can be introduced in any conversion), if that would help. Only have the Notes, Acknowledgements and–here’s the tough one–Index left to go.
Anthony: I was wondering if that would be useful. Can do. Eventually (in a week or so). After the HTML version.
(You can tell I’m having fun with this.)
I second the question (if that’s the right term).
To Guan, it would be a good idea to join infrastructure forces if we are to attempt translating this great work.
I was thinking in the lines of contacting existing book translators for tips on things like automation tools.
Don’t hesitate to contact me if you set something like this up.
firas said:
> I�m almost done with a proper plaintext version
great! i would be very happy to see it!
another option i should have mentioned is to o.c.r. the .pdf.
(i know, it’s just _absolutely_stupid_ to have to o.c.r. a .pdf
of a text that somebody obviously has in its original format.
but whacha gonna do?)
if the o.c.r. options are set wisely, i have a program that can
analyze the output to format an e-book rather automatically.
it’s not ready for public release yet, but i’d love to have some
good content like this on which to run it through some testing.
so if anyone would want to do this scanning, let me know and
i’ll tell you how to set the options correctly. (cross-checking it
against the one done “by hand” by firas is a good confirmation.
i’ll also back-convert some of the .html for the same purpose.)
> with markup delimited with special characters–
> the only real thing is italicizing and dashes
ok, but what about the block-quotes?, how ya doing those?
-bowerbird
bowerbird: To be clear, all I did by hand was to paste blackmask’s version into a text editor and run through the whole thing fixing the sometimes erroneous paragraph breaks. The marking of italics and superscripts, extra-space-fixing etc. could have been done via a search+replace anyway. (What I’m saying is that I probably didn’t catch every inconsistency.)
A blockqoute would be [carriage return][carriage return][open quotes]. Come to think of it, it would take visual confirmation to see that it isn’t in fact an inline quote starting a block of lessig’s writing.
I’ll be making the HTML version pretty carefully. If you need the semantics, formatting, etc., they’ll come with it (blockquotes will be in blockquote tags, etc.)
Anthony: how does a metafilter clone (say running metaphilter) with each paragraph as a post sound? I don’t see why a wiki (collaborative authoring system) would make more sense than a comments-type thing (discussion system). You get Dave Winer’s paragraph-level permalinks, you get comments, trackback… only thing missing is per-paragraph threaded discussion, but that’s kinda overkill–unless you were hinting at that?
I agree. I only suggested Wiki because I didn’t know the specifics of other solutions/technologies. People do run threads within Wikis, but the format is not ideal for them. A quick look suggests a MeFi could indeed be better for discussions.
Although, I do think both approaches have something different to offer. To get the full benefit of deletion/editing in a Wiki I guess one could be less precious about the original text, and encourage that to be evolved along with everything else. (An ability to reference an unaltered original as well would be useful.) Editability would also mean one could be more flexible in the mapping between the per-paragraph structure of the original text and the issues both evident in the book and arising from discussions it engenders. With respect to which…
Could be. I do think that there might be a desire to start multiple threads re the issues raised across e.g. a whole chapter. But the best way to find out is to start the experiment. I’ll be interested in what you come up with!
Things move fast in the blogosphere.
After hearing you on the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC (www.wnyc.org… look for archives… he was on in 2nd hour…)
It seems that you now are dis-associating yourself from your previous effort to champion the UCITA laws.
Please comment???
Have you made a 180 degree turn around in your beliefs?
It seems that the ideas proposed in free culture absolutely refute the “draconinan” ideas on ownership proposed in the overhaul of the UCC laws regarding software proposed in UCITA, and the original version of the UCC laws.
THAT you PROPOSED, as the COMMITTEE reporter, if I recall correctly too!!!!
Please discuss???
thanks in advance
I’ve just quickly skim-read a couple of chapters and would be grateful if somebody could enlighten me on the “property” angle. GNU/Stallman who is namechecked several times in the preface has said that the term “intellectual property” is intentionally misleading, having only come into widespread usage since the ’70s formation of the WIPO. GNU/Stallman also maintains that refering to disparate areas of law under the “property” banner is a ploy to encourage simplistic thinking, indeed “property” is the angle taken by those who deliberately confuse copyright infringement and theft in an attempt to prejudice public inference.
Quote:
While �creative property� is certainly �property� in a nerdy and
precise sense that lawyers are trained to understand
There is no legal system I am aware of that has ever confused copyright and property, nor do I see it mentioned in the US constitution. Is “creative property” a term that existed prior to the formation of the WIPO? If you have to be “trained” to understand why retaining legal rights is some form of property then the argument is obviously somewhat contrived. So lets consider the arguments for this strange alchemy, this wonderous transmogrification, links anyone?
Agree with fear about Kerry.
I hate to be a pooh bear but I am a little nonplussed that free culture is not “free.”
There is also a wiki version of Free Culture at http://blogspace.com/freeculture/Main_Page .
Public Financing of Campaigns – to disconnect our elected officials from being bought by the monied interests
Saving of the Last Ancient Forestlands in North America
Access to basic first-level health care for every American as a matter of right
A really serious program to diminish America’s reliance on imported oil. (e.g. higher mileage standards, higher fuel taxes, mandated bus/bike/pedestrian design of new transportation corridors)
A sane public-interest-driven set of policies regarding copyright vs. fair use
A new commitment to public diplomacy to adequately explain America’s ideals to the world
A new commitment in our international relations to walk-the-walk of the ideals that most Americans believe in (free elections, free enterprise for individuals, no thugs-with-guns running the neighborhood)
and, yes, unwavering response with extreme prejudice toward those individuals, groups, governments, or peoples whose lifestyle choice is the wanton murder of innocents (and/or American citizens, if you are the sort who cares to make such a distinction).
Kerry stands for none of this. Kerry sucks. The Democratic party, as a whole, stands for none of this. The Democratic party sucks. The only thing I can say in favor of GWB, is that he stands for the last point, with a firm resolve not shown by any politician on the Democratic side – otherwise he sucks too, but he still wins by a score of 1 – 0 on this list of some of the items that matter to me.
Why must I have to choose between a strong national security posture and a tolerant, caring society at home (and abroad)? History gives me more than ample reason to want both.
Democracy is about dividing and uniting various aspects of the electorate in ways that provide majorities on election day. The way the Republicans and the Democrats currently choose to define their constituencies guarantees us years to come of polarization and partisanship – with the advantage to the Republicans.
Democrats will win again (someday) when they retool their nominating process so that new people with new ideas (and a few choice old ones!) can receive prolonged exposure (and enhancement of stature) by virtue of a long, loud, vigorous, campaign of big ideas that DOES NOT ALLOW for an early winner to be chosen prior to the great mass of the voters getting their say. Imagine – New York, California, NOT EVEN HAVING VOTED and the Dems have declared the race over. It’s sickening.
Our systems, both political and governmental, are seriously broken, and the party that should be offering the solutions offers none. It’s so very sad …
Sorry for the multiple posts – they were unintended. Please delete this message and all but one of the previous. Thanks!
In re free culture: According to this, the film Reefer Madness didn’t become widely known until (and, the implied suggestion is, because) its copyright expired.
The article speaks of films that “languish” in the public domain. I would retort that the public domain is the only true home of works of the human mind.
Obama will be the third black senator in U.S. history, and then the first black president. And he will! It was a privilege, as a Chicago resident, to be able to vote for him in the Illinois primary.
Stupid posts like these completely ruin your credability. Bush hasn’t “attacked” Clarke. People are merely pointing out differences between what he says now and what he said then. Clarke is an obvious partisan who says nothing but good things about Clinton and nothing but bad things about Bush.
This does feel as if I’m coming into a conversation that’s already in progress, and I’m not quite understanding the dynamic (either of the conversation, or of blogging — to which I’m a newcomer). But it doesn’t seem as if the “more comments on Clarke” response relates to the “we need a good graphic” original post.
As a non-American, but long-time (taxation without representation) American resident, might I say that it seems to me that the current electoral contest is entirely lacking in real choices? Kerry may differ from Bush in certain limited areas of specific policy, but there is no real conceptual differenence in orientation — it’s all just marginally left or marginally right of a very centrist, isolationist, U.S.-centric agenda.
Are there any legitimate third-party choices? Does Ralph need to be perceived as a spoiler, or does he have something legitimate to offer? It seems to me that this this is an important conversation, and one that warrants raising above the current “this is a stupid post” discourse.
– Hmm… the reason Clarke remains credible is that he is not an “obvious partisan” – the same goes for Lessig- and, unless I missed something major on the news, no one has yet shown that Clarke’s allegations are unfounded. Miaow.
– Hmm… the reason Clarke remains credible is that he is not an “obvious partisan” – the same goes for Lessig- and, unless I missed something major on the news, no one has yet shown that Clarke’s allegations are unfounded. Miaow.
Clarke said good things about Bush when that was his job. Just noting this before anyone accuses him of hypocricy. cracy. crasy. Aha, now I know why Republicans decided to just call it “waffling.”
Whether having this opinion of the Bush administration damages Professor Lessig’s credibility is largely a matter of personal perspective. It certainly seems odd to argue that he shouldn’t be making comments like this on his own weblog. He’s is entitled to have and express whatever political opinions he has, and we, his readers, can decide for ourselves what that means to his credibility.
That aside, I’m not sure what subset of the hearings you were listening to, but Clarke seemed to be critical of both the Clinton and the Bush administrations. It was clear he felt that terrorism was an issue which presented increasing in threat, and was not getting adequate attention from either administration. He also did something that the Bush administration has not done: apologize for his own failures and those of his agency in their duty to protect the lives of American citizens. It’s far from clear to me how he can be labelled as partisan: if anything, the Bush administration’s response (against his character rather than the substance of his claims) make it seem that they are more deserving of that particular label.
uh, did any of you actually READ the linked article?
April fools, perhaps?
Hey read much?:
You hit the nail on the head…if you read the article it definitely is an April Fool’s joke. This makes Lawrence’s statement either foolish or sarcastic….I’m hoping for sarcastic.
As to Clarke, a key thing to me is his character which he has called into question by coming out with scathing, damning remarks of the administration (more than Clinton’s by the way) after having praised them just two years ago. His explanation was that he was a member of the staff and had to toe the line….here is my take on it…
1. Many of his statements in 2002 were of FACT, not opinion…so he is either lying now or then.
2. If he did lie about how he really felt about the state of the administrations anti-terrorism efforts to save his job, then he is a moral coward and again you can’t trust what he is saying. He basically admitted he put his job and salary above the safety of the American public. Did he apologize for that?
He is basically a frustrated bureaucrat looking for someone to blame for everything. His apology was theatrics and grandstanding.
It is a sad statement that the 9/11 commission can’t just look for the facts so we can improve things. It has become a tool in the war to end the war on terror (ie. the enemy is us, not the terrorists).
Fundamentally, nobody was prepared for 9/11 and even if a leader at any level was prepared, the public would have not allowed the actions necessary to quelch it. It was a turning point in history that opened a lot of peoples’ eyes – too many closed them again.
Also a linked HTML version is presently in the process of being ‘created’ (reborn?) here.
As far as ‘intellectual property’, and for that matter, ‘piracy’, I do agree with RMS. In my reading of the book itself, ‘intellectual property’ has not been misrepresented in any way. It is, for better or worse (my opinion: Worse) a legal term which has to be addressed. As a human being, I find it’s use abhorrent, but as someone who lives in a society structured by laws (perhaps instead of being structured by the founding ethics?), laws need to come more in line with ethics – and technology has ever been where these two deviate. From Galileo to File sharing.
Technology is not a student in this scenario. It’s a teacher. Humanity likes to think that humanity is the master of technology. We are as much masters as slaves; we have the potential to be as empowered as we are to be disempowered. As Richard Feynman liked to say of his trip to a Buddhist temple, humanity is given a key which can unlock both Heaven or Hell.
Ask Oppenheimer.
On the flip side, change scares, therefore technology scares, and it scares people who don’t understand. They just happen to be in authority, and pen the laws. Now. But in the future generations?
I rambled. Sorry.
Prof Lessig,
I think it’s very unfortunate that you chose not to use the Share-Alike condition in the CC license for this book. The book has only been out a few days and there’s already all kinds of really cool stuff being done–separately by N different people, and hardly anyone has announced an explicit license on what they’ve done. That makes it impossible to make a new version that combines and incorporates the best features of other ones that have already been done, like maybe making a Swedish translation or audio reading of the wiki-edited version. It’s not even clear if it’s ok to do something very basic, like unzip Blackmask’s html rendition and put it on one’s own web site.
I think it’s in the spirit of the non-commercial clause to also include the share-alike clause in almost all cases.
I just have to point out here that anyone who knows Larry Lessig even a little (I am a former student of his, so that’s about what I can claim) knows that he is far from a knee-jerk liberal or Democrat. It’s clear he doesn’t think much of Bush, but a lot of smart, conservative (in the true sense of that word) Republicans feel the same way. I’m not saying Larry is a Republican (though he once was, a Young Republican, I believe) or even a conservative, but his feelings about Bush don’t necessarily reflect liberal Democratic political leanings either. When I knew him at the University of Chicago I would have been very surprised to hear him accused of being a bleeding-heart.
hey, team, lighten up. the article I linked to was a joke april fools article. and it was in the theme of that article I was suggesting another with a graphic.
“Clarke said good things about Bush when that was his job.“
No.
When specifically instructed by his superiors to give a positive assessment of the Bush administration’s actions regarding terrorism at a press briefing, he did so.
As to his congressional testimony, he specifically said that the administration was engaged in its first 11 months.
911 occurred on month 7.
Translation: “They paid attention AFTER 911.”
Then you have them trying to out Clarke as gay via CNN and Blitzer, and you have a quote from a book saying essentially that the Iraq policy was so stupid that it could have been written by Osama (using a common literary metaphor), and it’s cast as “Osama can use his alien mind control powers.”
If these folks had said something to the effect of, “Clarke is a guy with a hammer, so everything looks like a nail, and he did not get the big picture,” this would all be over now.
They can’t because they believe that they have something like Papal infallibility.
Look at the s***storm stirred up from Letterman showing a kid nodding off during one of Shrub’s speeches.
No sense of proportion. Any criticism is an attack on America.
Alan:
[you said] “Many of his statements in 2002 were of FACT, not opinion�so he is either lying now or then.”
I’m not so inclined to agree given that: (1) Pat Buchanan (a Nixonian republican) has backed up Clarke’s statements then and now; and (2) Clarke himself has called Bill Frist’s bluff to “open the record” and said: fine! open it all. let everyone look at my record.
This doesn’t sound like a liar to me. And it certainly looks a hell of a lot better than an administration that won’t let its NSC advisor testify “under oath.” What good is Condi’s testimony if she can lie with impugnity. Richarde Clarke testified under oath to congress. If he lied in his testimony, he’s committed multiple felonies — an not just perjury. Lying to congress is a felony all by itself.
Dear Prof. Lessig,
Decided to glom on to this blog to thank you for your appearance at the 92nd St. Y on Mar. 23rd. I work for a magazine publisher with a website and the push-me, pull me thinking surrounding copyright protection and permission granting in a digital environment is a constant battle between the polar opposites of either expansion (free content) or contraction (lock down and charge $). We are gradually building a business model with an intelligent mixture, but your presentation allowed me to take a giant step back and get the big picture (yet again).
We spend a good deal of time debating the mechanics of content value, delivery, and protection (PDFs vs. html, for example) but instinctively I know that this is the “car talk” of the present and future and that we’re tinkering with the little parts. It was a great pleasure to revisit concepts which might make it possible to revise the whole framework of idea/content management. So you’ve a new fan, and of course, now, a student.
Regards,
N. J. Castro
phr, that’s what the Wikipedia is for. See the post above yours 🙂
Chapter 13, read by George Sessum is up – here.
Thanks for all you do Mr. Lessig.
I’ve started the Danish translation on Aaron Swartz’s wiki.
Daran, AAron’s blog post announcing that wiki is brilliant:
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001194
But there’s no explicit copyright on the wiki itself, which under the post-1977 copyright law, means there’s no permission for anyone else to copy it. Aaron might not even be able to fix that without getting everyone who’s already contributed to agree explicitly, or else throwing out all existing contributions and starting over from Larry’s text. There’s also that tree-structured HTML version, which seems to have been done mostly for the purpose of selling the structured-documentation software that generated it. If that’s the case, whoever did it might not be willing to permit anyone to make modified versions of the HTML file. The CC Share-Alike clause stops all of these problems and it really would make it easier and more rewarding for more people to improve the book.
phr: ShareAlike is irritating because, for instance, say Free Culture was a photograph. If you did a photoessay with it, besides giving attribution and providing the essay noncommercially, you’d have to release many of the rights you may reserve otherwise.
By the way, all contributions to AaronSw’s wiki are under an attribution/noncommercial license (click ‘edit this page’ to see the note.)
Anyway, about blackmask, it’s an interesting question. I mean, the AMKA-solicited recordings, and the blackmask and other conversions, are they copyrighted? I’d suppose so :S the only part of them not copyrighted is lessig’s content.
Professor,
More and more I think it boils down to yet another who can’t see the line between anarchy and freedom. As a result, we’re all ‘Hippies’ or ‘Commies’ or ‘Anti-capitalist’..
I can’t conceive how any man can argue with the Amicus brief by the economists in Eldred. But, let Mr. Manes have his rant. All publicity is good, and if his screed causes one more person to read your text, that’s one more who may experience the awakening to our fundamental principles being hijacked.
-kd
“infringe legally” — that would be an interesting trick.
Not really. In order for a court to even get to a fair use analysis, it has to find that the use was infringing a right of the copyright owner. Fair use thus allows you to infringe legally. Fair use is not an exception to the six rights of a copyright owner, it’s a defense to an infringement action; just like the doctrine of impossibility doesn’t mean you didn’t breach the contract.
So are you going to continue to use the Steamboat Willie example, and claim that it was a parody, a take-off, a knock-off, of Buster Keaton? It looked to me like he took the wind out of your sails pretty effectively on that one. You’ll have to find a new laugh line, Professor.
Stephen Manes is relentless in his personal flames on Lessig. I do say personal because look at what he has to say about Lessig
According to Manes in a recent review, LEssig is a “moron” who is an “intellectual bully.”
Manes critices Lessig over some of the Disney movies, and then totally misses the point about how Disney would reuse public domain material to make it their own.
“In his bloggy rage after being taken to task by a mere non-lawyer,” Really, where exactly did Lessig sound enraged. Really I see alot of name calling, insults and personal attacks, but guess who is dishing it out.
Stephen Manes is the real bully, and he should apologize.
MRL:
My main data point included a statement to the effect that the Bush administration was spending 5x as much as the Clinton administration on anti-terrorist activities in 2002.
Perhaps you can clarify – when Condileeza Rice testified in private to the commission – wasn’t that under oath? I think it was but I’m open to learning different.
Matthew:
Let me ask you what your assessment of a person is who was charged with such a serious responsibility as leading our fight against terror who would mislead the public. Spin is one thing but his statements are far beyond spin. If he didn’t believe them, then what kind of person is he – ie. willingly misleading the public on such an important issue. Doesn’t it seem a little worriesome to you? This is not a salesperson saying a product is a bit better than it really is – this is someone who literally had the lives of hundreds of millions of people in his hands. It is a sad comment on society that his excuse (I was told to say that) did not lead to the deep questioning of his character.
I’m not happy with many of the administration’s recent responses – I think it is a sign of worry over the stakes being played out.
Lawrence:
Free Culture is a great read – I have to digest your ideas for a while but as always you argue well from both a principle and factual basis. I’m glad my hope on this post was well placed…and I apologize for questioning you on something sooooo obvious.
You have a lot of passionate readers obviously (this one not excluded).
Lessig is almost right. What we really need is a picture of Nixon morphing into GWB.
You should consider carefully Manes’ nitpicking, as one poster has commented, because if your examples fall down on analysis, it allows detractors to distract readers from your *ideas*.
The primary problem with this exchange is exactly that, your central argument is lost in the confetti of facts, sleight-of-hand and slurs.
In your description of Free Culture, or as preface to these exchanges, you should briefly state the proposal at issue. Manes is actually effective in obscuring what I believe are sensible adjustments to copyright enforcement.
I thought your proposal is to accept copyright upon creation (which seems fair and consistent with international law), but to require registration of copyright for *extension*. Such a compromise allows for the near perpetual corporate exploitation (sans negative connotation) we see today, as well as easing the way for creative works to enter the public domain.
The current system assumes every author’s ambition is to bequeath an “Estate” to extract every last dime from their efforts, it makes bequeathing the public good a chore. Requiring registration for renewal simply reverses that equation, emphasizing the public good, while still permitting one with ambition or need to establish an estate.
Have I missed the point? This will become contentious and political as corporate interests and their allies seek to attack and obscure this issue, which is why your basic proposal needs to stated simply and repeatedly lest it be distorted.
P.S. Do not lower yourself, please. Was it necessary to describe Manes as “the master”?
Don’t forget The Lion King in the Disney film list, since it’s a blatant rip-off of a Japanese TV series that was even shown here:
http://www.kimbawlion.com/rant2.htm (clickable link)
Oops, sorry about Kimba link which was already mentioned in the article.
Meanwhile, Kipling’s The Jungle Book was written in 1894 so the copyright (if renewed) would have expired in 1950. The movie came out in 1967 so the book was public domain for more than a decade.
re “the Master”: stupid, I agree. I changed it.
re my proposal: yes, the Public Domain Enhancement Act is merely a requirement for registration after publication. It is not a registration requirement at the start. But Mr. Manes is right that I do say that I would be happy with copyright law in 1975. That would have required registration upon publication.
re Steamboat Willie: OF COURSE I will continue to use the example — until someone shows me that one would be free to making “Finding Nemie” without permission of Disney.
re infring legally: just the sort of comeback a stupid technical argument (mine) deserves.
much better!
What a great way of seeing it — the car talk of the present and the future! perfect and thanks.
Mr. Manes makes some interesting points (not many). However, it is lost in all the insults and abuse. It is clear that he has graduated from the Rush Limbaugh school of journalism. It’s too bad he can’t just make his point without all the abusive language.
I’m surprised not to see anything here about this:
CNN article
about the FCC and appeals court ruling regarding cable access.
Very interesting exchange, isn’t it? Despite all the namecalling, it’s good to see a line-by-line refutation. I confess that in the end I think Manes made some good points, esp. re the Steamboat Bill/ Steamboat Willie issue. Prof Lessig’s defense isn’t terribly persuasive on this point.
Well, if a “smart lawyer gal” can be so completely tripped by the Manes rhetoric, that does merit a further response. I’ve amended the stuff about the obviously true claim that I am many others before me have made re Steamboat Willie. There are hard and controversial questions out there, and I’m sure there are mistakes in my book. But this is not one.
Hey, cool. I think that’s helpful.
“infringe legally”
At least in Canada, can’t speak for all other countries, the “fair dealing” provisions in our Copyright Act are not “defenses” to infringement: they are exemptions to it.
An act that is fair dealing under Canadian law is described, not as “legal infringement”… it’s NOT INFRINGEMENT AT ALL.
But commentators and journalists get it wrong here as well:
http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2004/03/04/canada/lawscoc040304
“This exception allows some institutions, like libraries and museums, to infringe on copyrighted material because it is being used for research and study. “
Obviously, a blatantly wrong statement… in Canada, anyway.
Wait, I thought I found this link through you! Maybe I didn’t… But yeah, we’re gearing up here at FreeCulture.org (think MoveOn.org except cooler) to officially launch the site on April 23rd when you come here to speak at Swarthmore. Incidentally, I noticed that a bunch of people are using free-culture.org instead of free-culture.cc to get to your book… this could cause a lot of confusion if we become popular as well. Can you think of a way to resolve this? We have freeculture.net, we could trade you…
We should use this as an example of how silly trademark “confusion” doctrine is. The way the law is developing, it is almost as if if there’s anyone out there who might be confused, the use is not permitted. Let’s show the world we can do something better. We’ll add something to our site pointing people to yours if they’re coming to find you, and you can do the same?
Personally, I am insulted by Manes’s drivel. It makes those of us who defend creators’ rights look really, really bad.
More or Lessig
A bit more than a year ago, the W3C released the XPointer framework as an official recommendation. It’s meant to solve the linking problem generally for any data that can be represented as XML. It works very well and maybe, in a decade, we can say goodbye to anchors.
Brilliant! I hadn’t thought of it that way, defying “trademark confusion”. This is actually what Jake Wachman suggested, but he didn’t put it in that light. We are already linking to http://free-culture.cc from our front page, but once we have the final design, we’ll have some nice pretty banner at the top of the page advertising you 😉
That Xpointer stuff looks cool, and also seems to lend itself to remote quoting Ted Nelson style, but it looks too complicated for non-nerds. I couldn’t understand it after a quick skim, although no doubt I would eventually figure it out.
Ah, I did get the link from your post, search the page for the word “expressly”
I believe Lessig has done well here, but there seems a taste of emotion in this exchange… Frustration with Manes is understandable, but a rushed response or allowing any emotion increases the possibility of a misstatement.
On a personal level, this might not seem important compared to the prerogative of a vigorous self-defense, but it can be costly. A pundit such as Manes seems at the end of their game, having found a safe spot from which to sling dung. A pundit might get a television gig like Novak, publish books, or whatnot, but they’re still just a pundit–one who taints adversaries as entertainment. Note how Manes outlines his accomplishments–I contend that aside from private achievements, the rest of his life will consist of more-of-the-same.
Now if he can goad and troll someone like Lessig into playing whack-the-pundit, he gets to put a notch in his quiver. It’s like that old tale of drinking with the rich, but having to cover your tab when the bar closes. When you throw a pundits words back at them, it’s you who will be quoted out of context. The pundit doesn’t pay the tab, you do, and if your future public accomplishments are potentially *unlimited*, this can be tragic.
Yes, the XPointer stuff is generally too complicated for casual use, even for your average HTML guru. But, the thesis of FreeCulture applies to it as well; there are already proposed “remixes” providing usage schemes that are straightforward for humans and for building better tools.
I wanted to send you this story on a flap in the blogosphere, which I wrote partially inspired by Free Culture.
The short story is that because political kibbitzing that wasn’t online is now moving online, it creates the opportunity for reactionary media structures to strike at and informally regulate mainstream political speech. Here is one such case, and surely not the last.
bruce: Please say free-of-charge when you mean that, since the book is not free in a Stallman sense.
Excellent! I hope someone translates this into an open format like SMIL.
I think it should be apparent to you by now that a logical argument is not going to win Manes over to your side: the two of you disagree about too many fundementals. He, as a pundit, has decided to escalate to mockery. You, as a lawyer, should also consider escalating in your area of expertise.
As you have described when dissecting Eldred, the problem is not the logic of the case but a matter of making the problem relevant. So sue him. Find a plausible, winnable case against Manes, and sue him for copyright infringement. Were you to win (or at least look like you might) you’d probably have a convert.
Perhaps the quotes he’s taken from your writings are a few words to long? Fair use—see if his lawyer can prove it. Or maybe you can get Disney to do it for you, which would be a beautiful irony. Having them send him a cease-and-desist for his “Great Oz” metaphors would probably make him a champion of IP reform
(about half seriously)
–nate.
> Or maybe you can get Disney to do it for you, which would be a beautiful irony.
> Having them send him a cease-and-desist for his �Great Oz� metaphors would
> probably make him a champion of IP reform
Oops, I realize I was making that common assumption that Disney owns all items of popular culture. What is the current copyright of the Wizard of Oz?
–nate
larry, I think why you and Manes are seemlingly talking past each other in your interchange is because you both are referring to different things. From Manes perspective he sees what you and other “anarchists” want to do is liberate file-sharers on p2p networks from any restrictions or punishment by their infringing activities, even though you specifically refute that. He thinks when you say reforms are needed to make “fair use” more explicit in the digital age (as consumers are now also publishers), others will run with it to mean that if “fair use” enables one to share a copy of music with your friend, then it a digital network world everyone on p2p can be construded to be a “friend” and therefore destroy the economics of content creation.
Excellent response from Prof. Lessig. To those who say Manes “scored points” with his Buster Keaton examples, reread the post, as there has apparently been an update. It’s dissapointing to have to see such a reasonable scholar have to descend into the muck to slug it out with a hack who obfuscates and misrepresents at every turn. Count me in the column of a right winger free market believer who is appalled at the current state of the copyright wars.
To characterize the free culture movement as a gang of freeloaders is ridiculous. I think part of the problem is the name itself: “free culture” denotes a culture of people who want something for free, when, as Lessig aptly explains in his writings, free culture refers to creating a culture in which creators are free to create. How’s that for a poorly worded sentence. It’s good enough though.
I’d actually be interested in reading some criticism of Prof. Lessig’s writings, if there were such criticism that didn’t come from a RIAA press release or the ranting invective of an ignorant columnist.
Manes points out, when you remove the style and attitude from his article, that Free Culture is poorly-researched and poorly reasoned. A careful examination of Lessig’s previous work, such as The Future of Ideas, reveals that these traits are typical of the professor’s scholarship.
It’s unlikely that we’re going to have a reasonable debate on intellectual property when the conversation is dominated by bomb-tossers on both sides.
Well, that’s great. You know, I think the Bible is poorly-researched and poorly reasoned too. Same with the platform of the Republican Party. But my mere assertion of those points which I view as literal facts doesn’t necessarily make them objectively factual, nor does it automatically negate the ideas underlying those assemblages of opinion and persuasive writing.
The point Mr. Manic tries to make (and you seem to support, Richard) appears to rest on the postulate that since Steamboat Willie isn’t a plot-point-for-plot-point duplication of Steamboat Bill Jr. that no copyright infringement would have occurred regardless of the copyright regime in place at the time. Therefore, one has to question (and really, if you get down to it discard) every one of Prof. Lessig’s examples. One bad apple spoils the barrel, as it were.
In my opinion, and to use another cliche’, that attitude throws the baby out with the bathwater. Manes doesn’t refute the basic assertions of Free Culture, one of which is that we as a nation are legislating a permission culture where we are legally bound to seek permission for whatever use, no matter how limited, of something created by someone else. Instead, Manes contends that it’s really OK because no one will actually *enforce* these laws:
Well gee, I feel so much better now. Except that Big Media is holding all the thunderbolts and choosing who gets struck by them, and when they do strike, look out. You will be taken for every cent they can squeeze out of you, and your story will be used to make everyone else fear the thunderbolts being hurled at them next without regard for the legitimacy of their targeting.
I’m not prepared to take the time to do a full scholarly researching of all the examples used in Free Culture. I get its points, I agree with them, and that’s enough to persuade me to support Prof. Lessig.
I found Mr Manes arguments highly insensitive (he can’t be that ignorant? he just wants to fight, right?) to the range of dynamics in why / how people use copyrights. Many “content” creators, assuming their works are in some kind of demand, have to make a range of decisions about how to license their works and how to license the works of others. “Free Culture” brings a truly important perspective to anyone who has to make these decisions–and, at least some of that perspective is what Thomas Jefferson tried to embed in U.S. copyright law itself. “Balance”.
Manes seems to imagine some strawman copyright holder who is going to suffer terribly from the ideas in “Free Culture”, and then tries to argue his defense against each of these ideas from the book, which he wrongly interprets as attacks on that strawman.
“Free Culture” is not an attack on copyright holders or their rights, and Manes is misrepresenting the book’s and Lessig’s ideas.
I find it kind of amusing that the factual error (about Disney’s having paid for a few licenses) that Manes makes such a big deal out of might actually help the case for more limited copyrights. The longer the copyright, the higher the costs of creation, the more likely it is that only companies with as much capital as Disney will be able to afford engaging in creative acts. The facts seem to illustrate that even back then something like this may have been the case.
A Chinese edition of “Free Culture” is half done with Wiki collaboration. http://www.socialbrain.org/freeculture
Richard…from the looks of your “review’ of the Future of Ideas, I fail to see how you make your points on what you believe to be glaring holes with that book, and you’re now throwing up your hands at debating the ideas on Lessig’s new book ? Come on, you must be getting soft in your age.
This happened in the UK a long time ago, see the CDPA 1988 which extends copyring for Peter Pan, justified on social grounds: see CDPA 1988, s301 (schedule 6)
Provisions for the Benefit of the Hospital for Sick Children … “the work” means the play “Peter Pan” by Sir James Matthew Barrie. … The trustees are entitled, subject to the following provisions of this Schedule, to a royalty in respect of any public performance, commercial publication, broadcasting or inclusion in a cable programme service of the whole or any substantial part of the work or an adaptation of it. … The right of the trustees under this Schedule may not be assigned and shall cease if the trustees purport to assign or charge it. …
I have two major issues with Future of Ideas: 1) Lessig doesn’t have a serious grasp on the architecture of the Internet; and 2) Lessig makes wild claims regarding certain incidental features of the architecture (as he understands it) and the selection of the Internet as the primary packet network of the day. The book strikes me as an exercise in cargo cult thinking, and the overall alarmist tone is positively silly.
By all the accounts I’ve read, Free Culture suffers from the same sorts of defects, although the author (, being a lawyer and therefore smarter and wiser than the average human,) is supposed to have a deep understanding of Intellectual Property law. Having followed his forays in search of the ultimate IP policy for some time now, and having appreciated the advice offered to him by the Supreme Court in the past, there is little to suggest that this book will be a rewarding read.
I understand that the economics of publishing favor the “red-meat for the masses” approach we find in Ann Coulter, Michael Moore, and Lessig, I personally favor modesty and restraint in my authors. But that’s not to say that others won’t find an appealing message in Lessig.
Talk about wanting something for nothing…..The greed of people everywhere just never ceases to amaze me.
Not quite the same situation – in the Canadian case, all unpublished works in the specified time span would have been subject to this rather arbitrary deadline change. The LMM works were just the most visible part.
The link given (cbc.ca) is an article so terse as to be almost cryptic. A more thorough explanation is here:
Globe and Mail: Lucy Maud provision fades out
Buried in the committee minutes from last June are some copyright horror items. As this was being debated in committee (not in the House) the first time, at least one MP described entering the public domain as ‘the death’ of works. Another misleading chestnut was the occasional reference to ensuring benefits for authors, which is silly when you realize that authors had to be dead for at least 50 years before any of this debate was relevant.
Also missing from the debate was the whole question of what has been happening to any such works up to now. How did works go for more than 50 years without being published? If the rights holders haven’t been able to find a publisher in the last 50 years, maybe these works just aren’t all that valuable.
Peter Pan is governed by special legislation in the UK that effectively gives the owners (a hospital for sick children) immortal rights to charge royalties. Quite simply: if Walt Disney did not pay for royalties for Peter Pan in relation to products put onto the market in the UK, then it would be infringing the UK Copyright, Desgins & Patents Act 1988. This would be a good explanation for why they continue to pay for Peter Pan, but not for other works.
Terse!? The word “terse” is itself too terse!
I particularly like this line:
“The L.M. Montgomery estate and others were lobbying the federal government to extend the protection for unpublished works. “
This is rubbish. I wanted to use the word “bullshit” but I don’t know if I’m allowed. Oh, too late!
The ONLY literary estate that were so lobbying were Heirs of Lucy Maud Montgomery, Inc.
They (LMM Inc, etc.) cited other examples, including Stephen Leacock. Not only was his estate (if it exists, he died in 1944) NOT involved, he had strong opinions on copyright (see my blog).
They also cited John Macrae (“In Flanders Fields”, for those who know their famous WWI poetry)… which was especially sick, given that the ORIGINAL bill wouldn’t have affected his unpublished works (if any still exist). It was only the open-ended amended version, which would have abolished the public domain IN ALL UNPUBLISHED WORKS — going back to the cuneiform tablets still in the ground in Iraq — that put Macrae in play.
Now, we’ve gotten rid of half the mess in Canada when it comes to unpublished works. However, those who died from 1949 to 1998 inclusive get an excessively long copyright duration, until 2048, rather than a time-clock ticking from their death. That means that Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King (died 1950) gets almost 100 years, while Trudeau (died 2000) gets the same for his published or unpublished works. Bizarre. But that’s what happens when Parliament tries to ram through a copyright amendment at the last minute (which is how it has usually worked here.)
Bye-bye to s. 21 of Bill C-8. Hello to the Library and Archives of Canada, which is what the rest of the Bill is aimed at establishing.
BTW, it also removes certain onerous red tape for archives in respect of “unpublished works”, i.e., everything that archives hold…
AND it also expressly provides that it is NOT an infringement for the National Library/National Archives of Canada to copy and maintain copies of Canadian internet material, which means that ephemeral digital Canadiana can now be saved for posterity without the risk of copyright lawsuits!
Now, why can’t regional or local libraries and archives gain this same right?
Further on and further in.
Politics is not about perfection, contrary to what you might think from some of the above posters who are whining about “the lesser of two evils.” Anyone with a real commitment to the long-term changes that need to be made in this country should understand that abstaining from voting because you are too high and might to vote for the lesser of two evils only makes it more difficult for those who want to work for change.
It is immoral, in fact, to sit on the sidelines when the outcome will take our country further down the destructive world that George Bush has put us on, both at home and abroad. Freedom will die unless people are willing to make the tough pragmatic choices which the world presents us with.
Take John Kerry. People say they “are afraid” of him. But even the most cursory acquaintance with Kerry’s record shows that he would never do the country what George Bush has done in many areas: to take two that come to mind, on environmental issues; he would not be leading the assault on women’s rights, both at home and abroad under the noxious Gag Rule.
No one thinks that John Kerry is a saint. But at this time, 2004, after the nine candidates who were willing to make the race for the Democratic nomination have been through the primary process that exists, John Kerry is the candidate who persuaded the most people that he could oust George Bush. Notice that I did not say, the candidate who would be the polar opposite of George Bush; or the candidate who would never let his progressive followers down. We are where we are: it’s John Kerry or George Bush.
Only the most self-indulgent among us would continue to pretend that there is “no difference” between the two of these men and their basic approaches to governance. Standing aside and allowing the re-election of George Bush would be one of the greatest tragedies of American history. Let’s get John Kerry in the White House, and then get on with the hard, hard work of building a political movement that can produce the kind of long-lasting positive, progressive change we all want.
Are these derivative works (the audio files) also licensed under the by-nc license?
[i]Given billions of copyrighted works, from Web pages to feature films, the stats show that it�s probably harder to get sued in a copyright case than to get hit by lightning.[/i]
I’d just like to throw in that there’ve been times firms with lawyers went around intimidating websites, insisting they remove public domain works. Project Gutenberg, as scrupulous a respecter of copyright as exists on the planet, has been contacted in at least 14 separate instances.
With one or two exceptions, everyone backs down and pulls the work when the registered letter arrives.
An example is the book Right Ho, Jeeves, a Wodehouse book published stateside in ’34, but then not renewed. After Gutenberg added the title, a Wodehouse estate rep went around trying to get everyone to pull the file from their sites (Wodehouse is quite popular). Neither PG nor I did so, however many others did (I kind of told the rep off… and haven’t heard from them since.)
Such cases, of course, don’t show up as suits. But the assumption of corporate ownership, even as regards OBVIOUSLY public domain works, has the general public backing down.
So Mr. Manes’ argument that corporations are in fact my friends, when dicier issues such as fair use come into play, falls upon jaded ears.
Jim Garrison
Section 8b of the http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/1.0/legalcode “>lawspeak version of the license says:
I think that you could legally profit from providing the service of providing a derivative work.
http://www.blueoxen.org/tools/purplewiki/
http://purplewiki.blueoxen.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl
Oops, I forgot to mention this site. Currently the site is down for maintenance, but probably be available soon.
http://purpleslurple.cim3.org/
Richard, I’ve read your review of Future of Ideas, but your complaints aren’t very specific, and don’t seem to be many, with respect to the total amount of facts that Lessig has in the book.
What I would like to see, and haven’t, is anyone refuting Lessig’s ideas in any detailed or large way. Most of the arguments people make about the ideas are at most (just like Manes’, and yours) a couple of paragraphs long, rely on mostly opinion and not fact, and contain a lot of generalizations.
I would bet that Lessig would welcome someone to come up with a real rebuttal or argument longer than a page, and one that takes longer than coming up with insults and namecalling.
If Kerry was to take the bolder positions you prefer, he would have to first expose the GWB Republicans as radicals. This is a pretty mainstream opinion in my home country, but from what I see, it isn’t in yours.
The Democrats soundly rejected all the transformative leaders, preferring the reasonable, omni-pandering message of the Kerry campaign. Why should he change now?
That said, when survival is threatened, John Kerry seems to be capable of bold, risky manuevers. We’ll see what happens in the campaign.
Miro, if you think my comments on Future of Ideas rely on opinion and not fact you don’t know much about networks.
That’s hardly a compelling response. Each one of your posts reads like a preamble to some kind of intelligent post where you will make substantive points, and each time you offer none. Enough with the teasers, either stop insinuating that you have well thought out criticisms and MAKE them, or cut the act, and admit that your criticisms of these works are no better than Mane’s ranting. Your last comment in particular is quite typical of flippant comments that aren’t very useful to someone trying to make an objective observation of the debate.
I’d understand if you don’t want to write essays in the comments section of a blog entry, but at least get substantive, and make a point beyond simply alluding to the fact that you might have one.
Mr Bennett, I’d appreciate it if you could point out some specific mistakes in the book. I’m a technical guy and may have easily missed some legal mistakes, but I don’t remember spotting any particularly bad technical mistakes.
You’re not understanding my point. The Future of Ideas is 384 pages of material that don’t simply hinge on the points you make in your review of the book. I’m talking about your blog entry, “The Future of Mediocrity”.
What I’m saying is that Manes doesn’t attempt to review the book, despite that it’s called a ‘review’. He is, along with a lot of immature namecalling, trying to call the whole book to be wrong by refuting a select number of points in the book, which Lessig points out here in this blog entry.
Now I haven’t finished reading the book, so I can’t comment on all of what Manes complains about, but thus far, I see the same thing with your past review of the FOI. What is refreshing about Lessig’s writing is that he brings these issues with supporting history and facts. I felt the same way about “Information Feudalism” by Peter Drahos, which is on a related topic.
The opinion that I’m talking about is when you say “Lessig doesn�t have a serious grasp on the architecture of the Internet” when your points supporting that claim are quite minor when compared to the views he expressed in FOI, even if every one of your points are correct. It’s just not substantial enough to make that claim. I suspect Manes is on the same track, but I’m not sure yet.
What I also find interesting is your complaint of “bomb-tossers”, right before you imply that Lessig claims to be “smarter and wiser than the average human”, and the further implication that he is in search of an ‘ultimate IP policy’.
If anything, I see Lessig almost have a self-effacing tone to his writing, declaring almost every point along the way that he is attempting to bring these issues to light, and not claiming to have ultimate answers. Which he has.
My complaint, reiterated, is that I have not found anyone to actually take on these points of Lessig’s, in a way that is void of ‘bomb-tossing’/namecalling, and a way that is not just a book ‘review’. The Drahos book I mentioned above touches on a lot of the topics in Free Culture, but I wish there was a real counterpoint to FC than just bloggers and book reviewers.
TO: [email protected]
FROM:
Estimado Se�or Manes
Hay muchas personas que consideramos que el derecho de propiedad intelectual es v�lido, que debemos proteger nuestras creaciones. Sin embargo no estoy de acuerdo con el tratamiento que usted le ha dado al libro de cultura libre de se�or Lessig.
Afortunadamente se puede decir si se solo se detenan los derechos patimoniales de las obras o creaciones, eso har� que muchas personas opten por liberar el conocimiento y que este paso nos lleve a una civilizaci�n mejor.
Diego Sanchez
http://drdiegosanchez10.tripod.com
There are too many errors in FOI to detail them all here, so feel free to read my review, The Future of Mediocrity. Here’s a small excerpt:
—
The only proper way to regulate the Internet is to understand its foundation principles, reify them, and allow them and them alone to guide regulatory policy. We�re to believe the Internet was fully and completely hatched once and for all in an instant in 1981, and that any attempt to modify it in the interests of larger public concerns can only do it fatal damage. The Internet is a sovereign space, like a tribal reservation, that can�t be touched by Constitutional law or by statute:
One big theme of the book is that we need to get people to stop thinking about regulation as if it’s only something the government does. We need to start thinking about regulation in the sense that the architecture of the Internet regulates,” he says. “The Constitution has yet to catch up with this shift, to develop a way to express Constitutional values in the context of indirect regulation. Code becomes a sovereign power all its own in cyberspace. But the question is: Who authorizes this sovereignty and with what legitimacy? — Constitutionalist in Cyberspace, Penn Gazette
—
Lessig claims that the Internet is a chaotic mess in which any packet is treated just like any other packet. While the architecture of TCP/IP did create an unmanaged mess, the scaled-up Internet couldn’t be managed in this way, so a great deal of network engineering since TCP’s deployment on some of the old ARPANet’s links in 1981 has focused on taming it. Strategies have been devised to flow-control TCP traffic, to drop packets in congested nodes in non-random fashion, and to superimpose Quality of Service through explicit protocols, user contracts, and bi-lateral agreements between Network Service Providers.
Lessig sees this sort of network engineering as the violation of the Utopian network where all packets enjoy equal rights, but the reality is that it’s a necessary adjustment to the Internet’s contemporary mission, which is not the same as its mission circa 1981. Time passes and things change.
But even if he were right about the Internet’s Original Architecture, he would still be wrong on the larger point, which is that the Architecture is so sacred that it and it alone can guide Internet regulation in the future. The Original Ford Car didn’t have hydraulic brakes or air bags, but the current one does and we’re all the better for it. Thus it is with any invention – it’s the nature of technology to improve over time, and the Internet will continue to improve, shrieking law professors notwithstanding. And it should.
Free Culture has the same problem as FOI, according to the reviews and Lessig’s summaries. It asserts that there was a Golden Age of Copyright sometime in the past, and we’ve departed from it at great peril to the culture. Rather than being nostalgic about a past that never was, I’d rather be pragmatic and balanced about the interests of actual creators and consumers of Intellectual Property.
I suggest the interests of file-stealers and samplers don’t rate very highly in the equation, and this is apparently my chief point of difference with Lessig. I should note that I make my living creating Intellectual Property in the network engineering space, so this issues is not simply a parlor game for me.
The Original Ford Car also didn’t have a governor that prevented you from exceeding the speed limit, or a GPS setup with a black box to record your movements, or require that you buy gas only from Standard Oil refineries because only they had a special additive that the engine had to have. Change is indeed inevitable, but not all change is objectively good or in the consumer/citizen’s best interests. Prof. Lessig is trying to illustrate the possible (indeed, likely) consequences of the policy choices our leaders are making. Those consequences are, to me, frightening.
As far as being pragmatic and balanced, I’ll be pragmatic and balanced when the RIAA and MPAA do so. Since they have shown no such inclination, I see no reason to respond in kind. And I think you need to seriously reconsider the value of trying to be so pragmatic and balanced when such powerful interests have blatantly shown they are not interested in such lofty considerations, instead keeping their eyes and lawyers firmly fixed on the maximization of their profits. Which Prof. Lessig’s books illustrate.
I didn’t see that as his point. I saw his point as being that not only *can* that Architecture guide regulation, it *should* guide regulation; and in fact, it is expressly being *ignored* in favor of regulations that benefit monied interests without regard to the impacts of those regulations on said architecture. In fact, those regulations are being enacted *in spite* of the architecture, and the architecture will be legislatively coerced into compliance. Neither of us see that as a Good Thing. Packets are packets (mostly), today; but tomorrow, Comcast’s partners’ packets may be given higher priority while their non-partners are “accidentally” dropped or routed through Timbuktu. It’s all well and good to talk about enhancing networking through improvements in protocols and standards in a value-neutral world. But when you let corporate interests and therefore (necessarily!) corporate profit motives interfere with the development of those protocols and standards, you’ve got a recipe for disaster. At least from the perspective of someone interested in efficiency above all other concerns, or of someone interested in freedom and the rights of citizens.
Maybe it is analogous to the fencing of the Old West and the end of the open range, and maybe it’s inevitable that freedom must be curtailed in the name of an orderly society; but what does that say about us, that we have to have these regulations in order to live with each other? And has that need been amply demonstrated in the case of the Internet, as it had with the Old West? I don’t think so.
I think Prof. Lessig’s books are saying “hey, wake up out there! You’re missing what’s going on! The time to act is now, if you have any interest in maybe stopping these things from becoming entrenched in the law; because after that it’s going to be pretty difficult to get rid of them if you change your mind later!”
One thing I wanted to give Manes credit for, he used “bloviate” in a sentence. That was impressive.
I saw his point as being that not only *can* that Architecture guide regulation, it *should* guide regulation;
We agree then on the point Lessig tried to make in FOI. You feel that it’s a valid one, and I don’t. The TCP/IP architecture was expedient to carry a certain type of traffic for a certain set of applications at one point in history, and as we move into the space of different applications and higher bandwidth, we’ll necessarily have to alter the architecture to meet these new needs.
Once upon a time, highways were two-lane blacktops with lots of intersections; today we have multilane Interstates with controlled access. Sharing between cars and semis works better in the present system than it did in the old system, but lots of people complained about their towns being bypassed by the Interstates, the end of the railroads, etc. We made the decision to go with new highway architecture in the political process, not by consulting the hopes and dreams of the people who designed the two-lane blacktops.
And that’s where we are today with the Internet, and yes indeedy, the profit motive and the invisible hand of the market will play a large role in shaping the networks of the future. To that I say better the market than the government, but obviously YMV.
C’est la vie.
Diego says (my own Chicano translation)� �I share Brian�s opinion, the electronic edition of �Free Culture� is crisp (sharp, clear). We thank Professor Lessig for his work and especially for making his latest book available, in a form that we can read, discuss, comment and expand upon en Ecuador – South America.�
Just you watch.
They will try ti slime this through under NAFTA, or get another tradeal signed to gut this decision.
Does the DMCA or the Broadcast Flag count as “market” or “government”?
What if large market players *want* to do what the government wants? (e.g. user identification and data mining)
What if government *wants* to do what large market players want? (copyright)
Changing the subject, Seth? We all know that everything big is bad, and everything small, organic, and natural is good, especially if it’s old.
Now tell us where you stand on the question of whether Original Architecture must govern the regulation and design of the Internet of the Future.
I know you’re not saying that people with hopes and dreams should be excluded from the political process, right? Yet in fact that is exactly what happens when you remove regulation and “let the market decide”. In the absence of regulation, markets will enact such policies as maximize net profits; principles do not translate into economic figures and therefore are not a significant part of that calculation. It made no economic sense to run wires out into the hinterland to provide electricity and phone service to farmers; so if rural electrification programs and universal access regulations had not been put in place, even today there would be no such rural services. Witness how difficult it currently is to get broadband access rolled out nationwide, outside of the largest markets where infrastructure is already in place. South Korea is making a committment to roll out broadband access to their entire population; yet the great and powerful United States, technology leader of the world, can’t make any such committment because it’s not economically attractive.
Our history is littered with examples of the necessity of regulation and government involvement. The Interstate Highway system was not created for its economic benefits, it was created as a means to quickly move military resources between coasts and borders in time of war. The economic implications were only a secondary consideration, and it would never have been created if we had waited for private industry to get around to it. Indeed, I believe the Interstate system could only have been built as a Federal Government-mandated program. There was no incentive for the meat-packing industry to take steps to ensure the safety of their products until government food-handling regulations were put in place (and even now they struggle against them). And so on.
It may seem to make all the sense in the world to say that we should let those who are developing the network infrastructure have total control over how they go about their work, unfettered by government regulations; but if in so doing we turn over our national information infrastructure to the total control of companies only peripherally interested in the public good, I think we make a grave error. Those companies will make decisions and build in functionality to promote their own interests, regardless of whether or not those interests are in direct conflict with the public interest. And so the hopes and dreams of those who originally designed the network will be put aside, and we will get the Internet that the big corporations decide that they want to give us.
Unless we get our act together and prevent it.
Not at all. I’m quite serious. What is “the market” vs “government”, when it comes to DMCA or Broadcast Flag or copyright terms?
I don’t see “organic” or “natural” in that question, and “big” vs “small” only enters into it in that small market players often don’t have a great amount of power.
I believe the open and equal access models are, *as a general principle*, the correct way to go if possible, yes. Not quite on identical grounds as the A-listers often argue, but consistent.
I suppose the best way to express it is that I joke that the reason ISP’s and “no one owns the Internet”, are often so hard to grasp in political discourse, is that it’s actually a vigorous free market, and it’s so rare to see one that people tend not to know what one looks like 🙂
I just wanted to point out that the articles from TutorGig Encyclopedia and Encyclopedia4U are Wikipedia articles. You can see them at http://en.wikipedia.org/ without the flashing ads. 😉
As a Canadian, I always have trouble following these cases. Usually I only hear of them after the fact in the mainstream news, and I suspect I’m missing a lot. I know all the lawbloggers in the US; who’s covering things in Canada? Anyone have any suggestions?
Yes, regulation is a necessary evil lest the robber-baron corporations run roughshod over all of us little guys, I don’t contest that point. And yes, hopes and dreams are good, I never said otherwise; I questioned whether those of one small group are more important than those of the rest of us.
The question is whether the architecture of the Internet circa 1981 (not the ARPANET architecture, and not the architecture of the 90s or that of today) is the definitive guide to all Internet regulation in the future. Lessig says that the 1981 architecture contained all the core principles of the final answer to the engineering of packet networks, and any deviation from it is not just folly but disaster and a threat to democracy. He warns that nefarious forces want to rip the Internet off its Utopian moorings and use it to force us to mindlessly support filthy commerce, blind allegiance to the evil Halliburton/Enron/Disney axis, and subjugate us to entertainment addictions to infinitely copyrighted materials that cost us our arms and legs.
Lessig says the 1981 architecture is like the federal constitution: precious, perfect, and divinely inspired in its literal meaning. I find it odd that people who don’t have this view of the constitution are swayed by his comparison, and that those who do would find any analogy between the organization of a government and an engineering specification for a collection of packet routers.
Even the constitution has had to be amended and re-interpreted to allow slaves to be free, women to vote, an income tax to be levied, and a social security system to be created. Is it not reasonable that an architectural guess that may have made sense in 1981 would have to be revised to accommodate a more diverse set of applications that the Framers envisioned?
It does to me, but I’m not a lawyer, just an engineer.
“Yes, regulation is a necessary evil lest the robber-baron corporations run roughshod over all of us little guys, I don’t contest that point.”
While I do believe this :-), note I’m not appealing to it at all here.
Again, this is my point in asking “What is “the market” vs “government”, when it comes to DMCA or Broadcast Flag or copyright terms?”
All of those are regulations *in support* of specific business models (whether one is for or against it, that’s what they are).
It is unarguably true that certain forces got the DMCA, Broadcast Flag, and essentially perpetual copyright. That’s not arguable either.
Anyway, I think you’re overdoing what lawyers call “originalism”. Every smart legal prof knows the originalism argument, and the answer that it’s not details, but broad principles.
In fact, Lessig was a law clerk to one of the most rabid originalist judges, so I think it’s safe to say he’s very familiar with the argument.
Now if we could only get some rulings like that inside the United States.
It is unarguably true that certain forces got the DMCA, Broadcast Flag, and essentially perpetual copyright.
Just like “certain forces” got the abolition of slavery, the emancipation of women, and the Voting Rights Act. Creators of intellectual property have a right to protect their creations; even the Constitution says so. We live in an era when certain creations can be digitized, which makes them vulnerable to theft in a way that similar creations have never been before, so we’re trying out a variety of measures (such as encryption and the broadcast flag) to protect them from theft. I don’t see that there’s anything in principle wrong with this, any more than there’s anything in principle wrong with fencing the rangeland, as another reader has mentioned.
Lessig’s argument is simply that they didn’t do these things in the Good Old Days, so we shouldn’t do them now. Sorry, but that’s way to weak to persuade me that the sky is falling.
For Canadian news, try:
http://www.lexinformatica.org
“I don’t see that there’s anything in principle wrong with this, “
Umm, weren’t we just talking about whether broad principles can be used as an argument?
Lessig’s argument is that a certain kind of decentralized structure is the right way to do things, and it was done in the old days, and proved to be a great success, and we should continue it.
I believe you are misreading this argument as saying it’s *because*, simply as a kind of precedent, it was done that way in the Good Old Days.
Right, Seth; he says the Old Timey Architecture was good enough to get us to where we are, so it must be good enough to get us to where we want to go.
The two lane blacktops were good enough to get us from the farm to the town, but they didn’t get us to the Moon, or to Mars, or to Jupiter.
Time passes and things change, that’s the way of the world.
I’ll have to go back and re-read FOI then, because I don’t remember him taking the tone that you describe. I think the core principles you refer to are principles regarding openness and freedom of access, not technical principles regarding transport or protocol designs. Unless you are contending that it is impossible to engineer a scalable network with the openness and end-to-end principles the “old architecture” required using modern techniques, in which case I have to say I hope you are mistaken. I am not a networking expert so I can’t really speak to that, but it is certainly a gloomy prospect for the future freedom of the Internet if that is the case.
I have to say, the Internet seemed to work just fine before big corporate media started trying to corral and reshape it into just another revenue stream. I would think that it would continue to do so absent their meddling.
So you think there will be an explosion of creativity if we just hand over our right to do whatever we want with things we have purchased? I don’t see the analogy here. All I see are corporate entities engaging in extortion and golddigging, and I’m not going to support that.
Let me provide you with a concrete example of a new application that’s forced a re-engineering of the old architecture. You would agree that the old guys wanted to to treat “packets as packets”, giving each equal priority and discriminating neither for nor against any application, right?
OK, so along comes an application that by its very nature sends or receives an order of magnitude more packets than any other application on the net. Even though the net is nicely engineered, bandwidth is still finite so a bandwidth hog forces other users and applications to wait in line, often for long periods of time, even when they haver very little data to send. So the network engineers set to work identifying this particular application and throttling it so that it doesn’t screw up everybody else’s access and delay, and now packets are not packets and they don’t all have the same right to traverse the net.
You may think I’m talking about file-sharing, but this problem was first discovered when telnet and ftp tried to coexist back in the early, early days, and because of the necessary and reasonable compromises that were made, the TCP/IP network was no longer a place where every packet was just as privileged as any other packet.
For those not steeped in lore, “telnet” is an application that allows a terminal-looking device to use the Internet as a virtual modem to connect to a remote host computer, and “ftp” is an old file transfer protocol.
In the future, the Internet will be used primarily for telephony, broadcast radio and television, and classical browsing, and we’ll have to make priority adjustments and bandwidth allotments to ensure that a few people don’t hog bandwidth that should be shared with their neighbors.
Good fences make good neighbors, and good regulations make good networks.
Are you saying that throttling applications that use a lot of bandwidth means that TCP packets are no longer all “equal” on the Internet? Does the throttling take place in the TCP protocol itself, or in the application protocol?
I have understood Lessig’s argument to be more about where (in what part of the network, and at what layer) that kind-of packet discrimination occurs, rather than whether or not it could or should occur on the Internet.
I think Lessig might agree with your “good fences make good neighbors” analogy if you mean that they are our fences. But, I don’t know if the Berlin Wall or the wall around the Warsaw ghetto could be said to be fences that made good neighbors in the sense you are suggesting. I think that is a valid type of structural difference to distinguish in how “regulation” is implemented.
(Please excuse me if I misunderstood what you said–I am not an expert in this subject.)
Lessig’s argument is that it’s wrong for network providers to place any restrictions on network users – the Internet is supposed to be a “stupid network” that treats all packets the same. So it must be up to applications to police their own behavior, and given that some applications don’t care to do that, we’ve got a problem.
The “stupid network” model never worked, and the idea was actually abandoned soon after the TCP rollout in 1981. Lessig never got that memo, and has shown a remarkable resistance to the evidence thus far.
We’ve gotten a little off the track from talking about “Free Culture”, which is OK as long as we all understand that.
I don’t dispute that Quality of Service or bandwidth throttling might make good sense from an engineering perspective. But I think you are making the naive and invalid assumption that engineering concerns are the only factors at work in the development of the modern Internet architecture. Increasingly, decisions are being made on the basis of corporate agendas. Is there really a purely engineering-based need for a broadcast flag? In fact, is there ANY such need behind most of the changes being pressed by the content industry? I think not. To persist in believing that the network is immune to political tweaking because ultimately it is engineering concerns that will control its architecture strikes me as astoundingly short-sighted.
…to which I would add “because network providers have shown that they cannot be trusted to have the users’ best interests at heart”. Or more charitably, because network providers are at the mercy of the content industry’s powerful Congressional lobbies and expensive lawyers, and therefore cannot be expected to be able to protect their users at the risk of their own business. The Verizon ruling was an aberration, a hopeful one but I don’t think it will stand in the long run. Ultimately providers will be compelled to identify their users, one way or another, and the providers will be forced to stand aside and allow it. Prof. Lessig has been trying to warn us of the power of the content industry and the various methods they are using to twist the legal system to suit their own purposes. He has tried to illustrate the possible impacts upon us if we allow them to proceed unhindered. In that, I think he has done us all a great service.
I never have seen that memo, could you point me to it?
Oh for crying out loud. We’ve (the U.S.) have gone from the constitution’s original benchmark of 17 years to (now going on) 200 years. Please. Do we really need “I’ve Got You Babe” to be copyrighted until we’ve colonized Mars?
Since when did “intellectual” become an insult? An odd accusation to lob in a finance magazine. Are they embarking upon a new program to rid themselves of “intellectuals?”
Stephen Manes’s review and redirect are obnoxious and over-the-top and filled with ad hominem argument and derision, as Forbes seems to like its articles to be. That said, however, I believe Prof. Lessig’s reply is disingenuous when he states repeatedly that, “It was obvious, I thought, that….”
There is a true controversy here, and when I strip away the thick layers of insults and the bravado from Mr. Manes’s argument, I find something there that makes more sense to me than what Mr. Manes claims Prof. Lessig advocates. (I use this circumlocution because I have read only part of “Free Culture” so far, and I don’t accept Mr. Manes’s characterization of the book at face value.)
In my opinion, both the book (what I’ve read so far) and the review suffer from their authors’ extreme assertions about their opposites in the controversy. At this point, I discount most of Mr. Manes’s review, but I am so far unconvinced that Prof. Lessig’s proposal to rollback copyright law to 1975 (plus additional restrictions) is better than what we have today.
Richard….as I said before, these points you bring up are certainly important, interesting, and have relevance to Lessig’s FOI, but these points are really quite minor when compared to the larger issues of the book.
While network neutrality is a point that Lessig wants to make, even if he’s wrong about his history, the idea is still the same. It sounds like you might be too busy being upset that someone other than an engineer has something to say about the internet, and are hung up on that. The highway/road analogies that you’re trying to make are only hitting some of the points, and are flawed. The world does not run on 100% toll roads.
Nowhere do I see Lessig arguing that the Internet and its protocols need to be frozen in 1981, nor is he arguing that TCP/IP is the only way to go, nor is he proposing an implementation of how to make the end to end design work in the future. All of that is orthogonal to his point, and I’m surprised you weren’t able to understand that.
There are few things in my life more depressing that finding this kind of argument in this space. Indeed, I find myself unable to come back to my own blog when I know this Bennett stuff rages. I love argument, and honest disagreement. I loved reading “three blind mice.” But Mr. Bennett’s bullshit is too much for me.
When Bennett first posted his wonderfully titled, “The Future of Mediocrity,” I had an email exchange with him. I told him that the “review” was filled with simple mistakes, and that however interesting it might be to argue about points fundamental, it was a waste of time if he was going to be so sloppy about basic points.
For example, Bennett wrote
.
Bennett offers this to suggest that I didn’t know that Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web. Well, that would be amazing — a guy writing a book about the internet who didn’t know that Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web. But of course, as I pointed out to Bennett months ago, obviously, I was not saying that, for as I say at page 37 of the book, “As the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, describes it…” Obviously, what I was saying in the quote above was that the idea of a web was dreamed of most famously by MIT researchers — Bush, et al.
Bennett replied to me “I’ll check your book and see if I got this wrong,” but he hasn’t bothered to correct his multiply flawed review yet. When I first commented upon this, I said there was a “Rosanne Rosanna-Dana character” to the review — obvious facts make much of the criticism disappear — but tht was unfair to Rosanne. At least she had the decency to say, “nevermind.”
The real, substantive argument that Bennett and I had, and I guess continue to have, is whether the defining architectural feature of the internet was “end-to-end.” In this email exchange, he told me I was “seriously wrong” and must have been “mislead by the “experts” you consulted.” He backed this claim up by pointing to protocols in the TCP/IP suite that don’t seem to comply with the end-to-end ideas. When I pointed out that the protocol he pointed to was an essentially unutilized spec which didn’t undermine the fundamental point of Saltzer, Clark and Reed, he responded with a typically abusive email that said that proved nothing.
I am of course not a technologist. And of course, the only way I can understand this stuff is to read lots, and ask a lot of stupid questions of friends who are kind enough to waste their time with me. I’m grateful to many who have spent their time trying to explain these ideas to me. And I was extremely eager to understand whether or how I was mistaken about my reporting on the fundamental end-to-end architecture of the internet.
But I’ve tired of this game. Suffice it that there are at least two views out there: one (shared by Saltzer, Clark, Reed, and Cerf among many others) that a fundamental aspect of the internet’s design was end-to-end; the other, espoused by Richard Bennett, that it was not. In light of that split, I’m satisfied with the account I offered in The Future of Ideas.
I’ve had a bunch of emails from people asking me why I just don’t ban Bennett — making him not only the first person ejected from The Well, but the only person asked to leave the Lessig Blog. (Talk about a career of declining significance …) I won’t do that. I certainly won’t physically (ie, through the code) ban him, or anyone (save the evil spammers).
But I do want to ban the bad manners that darken these passages. Bennett has gotten better at this, but the point is a general one. Disagree with me, please. Disagree strongly and colorfully (as the mice did so well). But behave in the way you would want your 10 year old daughter or son to see you behave. Because when Google has its way, they will.
I hope you don’t see this a personal attack. We do have hate speech laws in my country. I mean to tell you why after reading Lessig’s Code critically for my Information Society law course last year, I find the material by Lessig, less useful now. Code was well written and easy to read but…. I have been reading Rob Kitchin’s Cyberspace the past few months. He seems as a geographer to have some of the same legal dispute examples from the net(lambda moo) used by Lessig in Code. Yet his solutions to this new area of problems and changes is not legal in the sense the Lessig’s are.
This is where I no longer need Lessig. His solutions all seem to be about the US consitution. Fine if your an American and most Internet users are I suppose. But most of the Internet legal commenators are saying we need international solutions. US free speech is not Canadian freedom of expression. Nor is it Indian press law nor is it Russian press law. Lessig in my mind is a cultural imperialist.
Our Supreme court in Canada has taken different stances on patenting life, and just yesterday it seems, P2P file sharing. Also Canadian protection of personal information is more strict than American.
But wait then there is Rob Kitchin who is in Ireland. I don’t know the details of the law there in Ireland. I do know the laws there are not American or Canadian. So why would we need a made in America solution to an international problem or set of problems brought on by the Internet?
Now to the present issue copyright. I have been a creative artist for many years making almost nothing in income from this art. Just this past year I have started to collect royalties and now my wife is about to start to collect royalties. We are creative writers. We are extremely poor, disabled and struggle with our health. That we should as we start to become paid artists suddenly subscribe to giving our art away for free instead of profiting is I think advising us to commit suicide. I don’t mind my essays being given away and I usual post my school papers on my web sites. We both have lots of our poems also self web published. But I don’t post my songs for download. We should freely choose our copyright regime. I will not subscribe to the creative commons licence under pressure.
I feel many academics are just another jumping on the band wagon. Reading about the Internet in school is getting to be difficult.
In response to Peter T.’s comment, “I will not subscribe to the creative commons licence under pressure.” I agree one shouldn’t be coerced one way or the other. That is why I put a CC Attribution license on all my writing. I want to have the freedom to choose, and I want to give others the freedom to choose.
“Our Supreme court in Canada”
The P2P case wasn’t Supreme Court, or even an appelate court for that matter. It was the trial division. There are two levels of appeal to go.
“We are extremely poor”
That is unfortunate. I know the feeling. Been there, done it. However, it does’t logically follow that broader copyright rights, on a wider range of uses, and for a longer period of time, will make anyone unpoor, at least in the latter instance, not them, not during their lifetime.
No more so than stronger criminal penalties for bank fraud, theft, or any other economic crime will put more money in anyone’s bank account.
in the Canadian case, all unpublished works in the specified time span would have been subject to this rather arbitrary deadline change
While technically true, this is an example of a “tall blonde man with one brown shoe” bill–that is, one which ostensibly benefits a group of people who meet the bill’s rather bizarre and exact criteria, but which in reality ends up helping the one (or few) lobbying for the bill.
Well, there’s another voice of reason to add to the many others that have objectively (and notably avoided ad-hominem snipes) provided a bulwark to Prof. Lessig’s arguments. I only wish the poster had claimed the fame that is due them for such an amazing post.
I do not envy the mental task at hand for Mr. Bennett and Mr. Manes; to them, it must feel like the rug is being pulled out from beneath them and I do hope that they land on their feet when all is said and done. But the fact remains that their position is untenable. To the best of my knowledge, whenever law has collided with sociological norms, sociological norms have prevailed….especially when harm cannot be proven by established industries.
Before we focus on figuring out a way to compensate content creators, shouldn’t we figure out whether they’re being negatively affected? I am reminded of Mr. Valenti’s statement that the VCR would be Boston Strangler to his industry…every time I drive by a BlockBuster store.
Interesting side-note: this seems to be becoming more politicized. Conservatives want to constrict the internet while liberals seek to keep it unconstrained. The freedom of the internet probably won’t make it into this year’s election campaigns, but look for it to be huge in four years.
I think I have finally figured out what the problem is with Mr. Bennett’s arguments. It appears that he honestly believes that the Internet cannot advance or progress wihtout DRM. If that is so, he has bought the White Paper of the Lehman Working Group hook, line, and sinker. That paper is the place that intoduced all the ideas like “without content, no one will use the Internet.” Well, that is a according to Jessica Litman, anyway. But if what she says is true, we are once again all victims of this political assault.
DRM is not necessary for the future progress of the Internet. If Mr. Bennett honestly believes so, he needs to take long vacation somewhere where it is too hot to wear a tie.
PS: I wrote that other “cross post” post. I tried to write my name in the name box, but it got deleted for some reason. Maybe if I click the “Remember Me” box, it will work. I will try that this time.
Just in case, I am LuYu.
I wasn’t really sure that I was winning the argument here until I read Lessig’s latest comment, the one which consists almost solely of ad hominem attacks, weird claims about the nature of my review of Future of Ideas, defammatory charges that I was the first person kicked off the WELL (I wasn’t, of course), the appeal to pity (“There are few things in my life more depressing that finding this kind of argument in this space”), and the obfuscatory talk about good manners, etc. Lessig wouldn’t have to resort to these rhetorical hi-jinks if he were on solid ground intellectually, and I think most of us know that, which is why the comments have pretty well dried up now.
So in the interest of putting the discussion back on track, I’d like to clarify two things: first, my main objection to the “Future of Ideas” is the argument for originalism as the regulatory framework, not the role of the end-to-end TCP protocol in the overall Internet Protocol suite. Lessig asserts that the “Original Architecture” of the Internet, which in his mind is the TCP protocol, must guide all future regulations in much the same way that the Constitution of the United States guides all of the activities of the three branches of government, etc. I reject this opinion, and say in its stead that the Internet should be regulated by the governments of the United States in accordance with the desires of the people as expressed in their legislative bodies, constrained by the real Constitution. The author of the TCP protocol specification did not understand the protocol to be anything but a means for a particular set of applications to deliver data between systems with one or more networks in between, and the specification certainly wasn’t vetted and approved by any body with the authority to legislate. Lessig’s argument here is apparently a too-clever-by-half attempt to appeal to the originalists on the court, who see right through it.
Secondly, on the role of end-to-end in the Internet, Lessig claims to agree with MIT luminaries Reed, Clark, and Saltzer, the authors of “End-to-End Arguments in System Design,” and to disagree with me. I don’t disagree with the paper, but I do understand it differently than Lessig, and don’t take it to be an excuse for designing bad networks. In fact, the paper’s primary focus isn’t network design – check the title – it’s system design. The main point that the authors make is actually a very small one, to the effect that programmers need to check transferred data at its final destination before committing it to storage; it mainly revolves around an incident in which some source code was corrupted because programmers assumed that the network was error-free when, because of a bad memory board on a router, it wasn’t.
You can’t madly generalize from the experience of one programmer with one memory board on one router twenty-five years ago to a comprehensive regulatory framework for all future networks, not in this universe or in any other one, no, no, no.
The end-to-end argument has a role in network design, certainly; we need good data, whatever that means to an application, at the end-points of the network; but that does not mean that the network must not protect itself from corruption and attack, that the network must treat spam on the same footing as legitimate correspondence, or that everyone has a divine right to steal as many songs or to download as much porn as he likes at pubic expense.
Companies that sell communications services that connect to the Internet should be free to bundle and package and price their services as they and their regulators see fit, regardless of what RFC 793 said back in 1981 about one type of communication the Internet supported.
(an aside to LuYu: I actually do make my living creating intellectual property; it’s primarily protected through patents, not copyrights, and I’m pretty sure about this.)
Then I revise my statement:
You’ve got it exactly backward, LuYu: I create the ideas, and the grants the rights to me, based on my patent applications. The government is really not a creative agent.
Now back to Lessig, here’s a passage from the essay End-to-End Arguments in System Design that Lessig claims as the source for his originalist argument that the Internet is and must be strictly an “end-to-end” managed network:
Using the end-to-end argument sometimes requires subtlety of analyis of application requirements. For example, consider a computer communication network that carries some packet voice connections, conversations between digital telephone instruments. For those connections that carry voice packets, an unusually strong version of the end-to-end argument applies: if low levels of the communication system try to accomplish bit-perfect communication, they will probably introduce uncontrolled delays in packet delivery, for example, by requesting retransmission of damaged packets and holding up delivery of later packets until earlier ones have been correctly retransmitted. Such delays are disruptive to the voice application, which needs to feed data at a constant rate to the listener. It is better to accept slightly damaged packets as they are, or even to replace them with silence, a duplicate of the previous packet, or a noise burst. The natural redundancy of voice, together with the high-level error correction procedure in which one participant says “excuse me, someone dropped a glass. Would you please say that again?” will handle such dropouts, if they are relatively infrequent.
However, this strong version of the end-to-end argument is a property of the specific application � two people in real-time conversation � rather than a property, say, of speech in general. If one considers instead a speech message system, in which the voice packets are stored in a file for later listening by the recipient, the arguments suddenly change their nature. Short delays in delivery of packets to the storage medium are not particularly disruptive so there is no longer any objection to low-level reliability measures that might introduce delay in order to achieve reliability. More important, it is actually helpful to this application to get as much accuracy as possible in the recorded message, since the recipient, at the time of listening to the recording, is not going to be able to ask the sender to repeat a sentence. On the other hand, with a storage system acting as the receiving end of the voice communication, an end-to-end argument does apply to packet ordering and duplicate suppression. Thus the end-to-end argument is not an absolute rule, but rather a guideline that helps in application and protocol design analysis; one must use some care to identify the end points to which the argument should be applied.”
End-to-end is a guideline for applications, not a law about the network; important distinction.
The quoted text spans two paragraphs, but only the first was properly italicized. The last word from Saltzer, Reed, and Clark is: “Thus the end-to-end argument is not an absolute rule, but rather a guideline that helps in application and protocol design analysis; one must use some care to identify the end points to which the argument should be applied.”
It seems to me that Lessig fails to use the the care that the authors counsel.
PurpleSlurple’s home, http://www.purpleslurple.net, is back up. So too is CIM’s PurpleSlurple site, http://purpleslurple.cim3.org/.
Perpetual Protection of Unpublished Works: Canada v Australia
Canada was wise to revise the Copyright Act in 1997-98. Until then, unpublished documents enjoyed perpetual copyright protection. With the 1997-98 changes, works written by individuals who had died before 1949 were given a five-year grace period, to the end of 2003, before copyright expired and the works could enter the public domain.
By contrast, Australia has not reformed the copyright term of unpublished works. The National Library of Australia expressed its chagrin over this state of affairs several years ago:
“In the case of unpublished works such as manuscripts there is a need to reduce the duration of copyright. Section 33(3) of the Copyright Act, 1968 states that copyright in unpublished works continues to subsist until 50 years after the works are first published. Most manuscripts are never published, and remain in perpetual copyright. When the British Copyright Act was amended in 1988, no distinction was made between published and unpublished works as far as the duration of copyright was concerned. Section 12 of the British act states that copyright in literary works expires 50 years after the death of the author. The New Zealand Copyright Act, 1994 adopts this approach. Unless Section 33(3) is amended and the duration of copyright made finite, it will be very difficult for libraries and archives to undertake any large-scale digitisation projects involving manuscripts.”
With the advent of the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement, it looks like unpublished works will receive 70 years of protection after publication. It seems that unpublished works – which are never released – will receive perpetual protection.
Matthew Rimmer
“I create the ideas, and the grants the rights to me, based on my patent applications. The government is really not a creative agent.”
You only have it half wrong on this account. Sure you may have the ability to create, but that alone does not automatically grant you any kind of right. The right to possess the patents, copyrights, etc. is done through social contract between you and the public.
Or at least that is the way it used to be. The real argument here is weither or not the public are even accounted for in this social contract. And from the remarks Stephen Manes, they have no regard with how precious the social contract system works. You don’t have authority, you are granted authority. Big difference as opposed to assuming that the authority is already born innante within you.
Just to clarify the record…while Roseanne Roseanna-Danna was indeed a frequent commentator on Weekend Update, the catchword “nevermind” was actually the hallmark of another commentator, Emily Litella. Emily was known for taking slight misstatements or a small misunderstanding of meaning and going off on a wild crusade against a perceived injustice. Then, when her misunderstanding was clarified, she would apologize by saying “nevermind”. Roseanne was a stereotypical New Yawk-er whose catchphrase was “it just goes to show you, it’s always something!”. Both Emily and Roseanne were characters created by Gilda Radner, whose work and wit lives on in our memories and in reruns.
We now return you to your regularly-scheduled mudslinging.
That should have read: ” create the ideas, and the *government* grants the rights to me…”
It’s hard for me to use the g-word in public.
Correction accepted.
In the U.S. prior to the 1976 act, most unpublished works were subject to a common-law right of first publication which was indefinite. In theory it could be perpetual, but it could also in theory be lost. And it was a right of first publication only, not a “copyright”. Was not the Canadian situation similar ?
It seems that copyright has ex-ter-mi-nat-ed some episodes of Dr. Who:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/04/13/1081838720006.html
The Wizard of Oz, the book, is out of copyright. The final L. Frank Baum book in the series is still in copyright, owned by some publisher or other, thanks to the copyright “extension”. 😛
Richard Bennett wrote:
“Creators of intellectual property have a right to protect their creations; even the Constitution says so. “
So you’ve already been corrected about the phrase “creators of intellectual property”; I’ll politely reinterpret this as:
“Creators of works on which the government grants intellectual property rights have a right to protect their creations; even the Constitution says so. “
Hope that’s OK.
Now, this sentence is *still* wrong, containing two more major errors.
The Consistitution says that Congress has the power “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”.
According to the Constitution, this “right” is entirely artificial; Congress may secure it, or it may decide not to. I hope that you already understand that. This means that creators only “have” those rights at the whim of Congress — the Constitutition does not, in any sense, say that creators “have” rights over their creations, merely that Congress may, in some specific circumstances, grant them rights, as part of promoting the “progress of science and useful arts”.
So this is a major error. Perhaps creators “have” such rights, but the Constitution does *not* say that they do.
The next error in Richard’s sentence is that Congress can’t (and doesn’t) grant “the right to protect their creations”. There’s nothing about “protection”. Congress can grant to authors “exclusive rights” to their writings, or it can grant to inventors “exclusive rights” to their inventions.
“Protection” of writings or inventions is not a concept present in the Constitution. “Protection” treats works like children who might somehow get hurt. Writings and inventions, as intellectual items, can’t be hurt, and don’t need “protection”; no matter what happens to a copy, the original still exists in all its unmodified glory.
When people talk about “protection” of works, they usually mean protection of the *copyright or patent holder’s income*, not protection of the work. And the Constitution doesn’t contemplate any such right either!
“That we should as we start to become paid artists suddenly subscribe to giving our art away for free instead of profiting is I think advising us to commit suicide.”
Fine, that’s great; many of us create copyrighted works for a living. Nobody here wants to force you to give away your work during your lifetime. I hope you don’t care about having longer copyright terms for your works during the period after you’re already dead!
These copyright extension laws give no meaningful benefit to the authors, since they’re extending copyright from one point after the author’s death to an even *later* point after the author’s death. The economic analysis indicates that such an extension is probably going to be worth absolutely nothing to you. 😛
“In the U.S. prior to the 1976 act, most unpublished works were subject to a common-law right of first publication which was indefinite. In theory it could be perpetual, but it could also in theory be lost.”
Wasn’t it lost upon the death of the author?
Guys, this is a fascinating exchange for me to read. It’s like seeing two invisible people try to play catch with each other.
Mr. Lessig — I don’t think Mr. Bennett is rude, insensitive, or incorrect for the most part. Mr. Bennett is simply taking things from a very consequentialist engineering perspective, one common to many if not most engineers, including myself. We make the network the way we want to make it, or need to make it, in order to do what we want or need to do. The architecture of the network simply depends on what we want to do with it. I think that’s all he’s really saying.
Mr. Bennett — I think you’re ascribing a bit too much vigor to Mr. Lessig’s reliance on the original architecture as a sort of requirement that ‘cannot’ or ‘should not’ be changed. I don’t see Mr. Lessig saying that. I think he’s rather trying to say that the freedom we have had on the internet up to this point has been a good thing, and even if some forces may push us to re-engineer certain aspects of the network, we should resist that if it substantially moves away from this freer architecture we’ve had up to now.
So Mr. Bennett is saying “we simply make the network what we want it to be.” Mr. Lessig is saying “we want it to be substantially the way it’s been, because of the freedom that initial architecture has allowed, because I like that freedom.” These, in my opinion, are qualitatively different statements.
I think these arguments can co-exist, as long as Mr. Lessig doesn’t assert that the architecture itself is a basic organizing principle. Clearly, it’s true that the architecture flows from the applications we implement or want to implement on the network.
The distinction here is in the characterization of the initial architecture. I don’t know what the initial architects of the network were thinking. I believe Mr. Lessig may have characterized the initial network as having been created with the goal of a freedom supporting architecture in mind. If that’s the case, it may be incorrect — my inclination would be to believe the engineer’s motives to be simplicity, efficiency, practicality, and the achievement of the objectives at the time, rather than any ‘free architecture’… I would tend to think the sense that this architecture supported freedom is a realization that came later, and probably not one that was a goal of the architects ex ante.
Really, can’t we just agree that the network was engineered simply, for the tasks at hand, and that’s it? Just like a simple society is simple for efficiency reasons, so too the internet. And then come negative externalities, and the requirement of further regulation, be it in the form of higher-level protocols or law…
It’s difficult to pinpoint it, but I think Mr. Lessig sort of views this architecture as a favorable history, from which we should learn and base our future decisions, from a moral perspective. Mr. Bennett simply views it as history, neither favorable or unfavorable, but performing the task for which it was created; a very neutral stance.
Bennett is saying the architecture follows the applications. Lessig is saying freedom is the application he wants to implement.
Oh, and my 2 cents? I think in the end we will fight out a balance, but we will have to have identification and DRM, because these enable applications that people want, and what people want, people will get. If we don’t build those features into the network, at some level, we will see ‘the tragedy of the commons’ in terms of creativity. Although recombination of existing works would be greater without DRM, original works would be fewer. We need some of both, but the higher valued of the two would be originality in my opinion, so the balance should be struck in its favor… I know this is on the less popular end of the seesaw (at least on this site), but that’s where I end up right now.
“Wasn�t it lost upon the death of the author?”
In Canada, it was not. This was considered to be a large problem just waiting to happen. This the topic around which the whole LMM issue revolves.
Imagine sifting through the ash of Pompeii, and finding a clay tablet with most of a private letter written, yet never sent or released. You, as an archaeological researcher, publish this clay tablet as part of your research findings. (It’s historically significant, because clay tablets likely weren’t used much by that time.)
However, a particularly litigious distant relative of the person who wrote the letter sues you for copyright infringement! They argue that since copyright is extant in an unpublished work forever, they as the rightful heirs hold the exclusive right to publish that work. They might even have a good case, since 1925 years is significantly less than forever.
But – “common sense revolts at the idea” that this is in any way how things should work out. But it was what the letter of the law stated, so the law was revised to limit the term of unpublished works, bringing the law into sync with common sense. Making the term the same as published works also made sense, since we had long since stopped requiring explicit registration of works for copyright purposes. In Canada, copyright in all works is now extant from the moment of their creation through 50 years following the author’s death.
This whole case of LMM and any similarly situated works is just working through the temporary concessions the new act granted to those with old, unpublished works. It seemed unfair to instantly take a work that was currently under infinite copyright and suddenly give it just a few years, when the same author’s other works had only just entered the public domain. With the final pre-1949 concessions behind us, the only remaining timed item is the 2048 date for unpublished works of authors who died between 1949 and 1998. Any rights holders with unpublished works, who of course will not be the original authors, have another 44 years to publish within the granted monopoly.
The new Act is consistent in treatment of works, easy to understand for all, easy to apply for librarians and archivists, and in general fair to all parties. Although death+50 will in some cases make for long terms, there are cases – such as the death of a just-published author – in which it makes a lot of sense. So, rather than create a byzantine legal structure, we’ve moved a little in the direction of the author, but gained a consistent treatment for all works. I think we can live (and die) with this.
This is all great–Canadians don’t make enough noise about copyright by half. I was especially glad tho to read the comments of Peter T. I agree that “user rights” people have to take creators’ rights seriously. I love the idea of creativecommons, but agree that it is a lot easier for a salaried university professor, say, to be magnanimous than an independent creator: there are a lot of problems creativecommons can’t solve. The “cultural industries” are notorious for using creators’ rights as an alibi for their own often opposing interests–everybody feels sorry for poor artists so this strategy really works on MPs, congresspeople etc. This blatant fakery should be an opportunity: user rights people should be coming forward with education, dialogue opportunities, policy alternatives–they/we don’t want to be guilty of the same move, saying we speak for “starving artists.” Although I have various differences with the Creators’ Rights Association’s objectives (see http://www.cra-adc.ca), I admire their international scope, and also their recognition that the interests of rights-holders (including heirs, corporations etc.) are not the same as the interests of creators. (The Writers’ Union of Canada for example does not seem to recognize this.) Perhaps part of what needs to be done is a broadening of the scope so that copyright is not the only hope held out to artists. More copyright all the time is not going to help most creators–or, equally important, potential creators–those who are just amateurs, apprentices, or babies! The government promotes copyright as a solution partly because copyright costs it nothing–meanwhile I hear Canada is considering scrapping the FACTOR grants, that is, grants to musicians for making recordings–a support directly aimed at creators. This is pathetic. I’d love to network with Canadian artists/performers etc. to build some bridges, argue, get visionary, get realistic. Check out my website or email me if that’s a discussion you’d want to be part of.
Jesus H Christ.
If half the effort that went into the hissy fits above had been put into doing something useful we’d have solved half the world’s problems by now.
“So are you going to continue to use the Steamboat Willie example, and claim that it was a parody, a take-off, a knock-off, of Buster Keaton? It looked to me like he took the wind out of your sails pretty effectively on that one.”
Yes, that is how it was meant to look. But if you re-read it, he’s doing the classic bait-and-switch of arguing a completely different point (was the music licensed?) to the one he claims to refute (was it a parody?).
Sadly, Prof. Lessig doesn’t point this out clearly either…
“The new Act is consistent in treatment of works, easy to understand for all”
Except for those unpublished works by the people who died in between 1949 and 1998. Instead of keying-to-death, the term is keyed to 2048, with the absurd result that — for example, Mackenzie King’s published works are now in the public domain, but his private papers will be under copyright for almost 100 posthumous years!
This was the real problem that needed fixing in the copyright act, not poor old Lucy Maud’s works finally making the inevitable transition to the public domain.
“easy to apply for librarians and archivists”
You would think that it would have been a strong selling point, but the silence of the librarians and archivists in Canada on these issues has been absolutely deafening. I don’t get it. I know they like it quiet, but this is ridiculous.
The National Archives and the Bureau of Canadian Archivists actually caved in, and, behind closed doors, gave the LMM estate exactly what they had lobbied for in the form of C-36.
As a brief aside on a factual question: “…I�ve had a bunch of emails from people asking me why I just don�t ban Bennett � making him not only the first person ejected from The Well, but the only person asked to leave the Lessig Blog.” — Lessig.
This is incorrect as Mr. Bennett points out.
In honour of this, I have put together my Canadian remix of Free Culture, with the appropriate spelling changes made. 🙂
I am probably in the wrong forum, and if so i would appreciate direction to the proper one. This being said, reading the most recent lessig book, i find myself with conflicting moral beliefs of pirating music from the internet. As much as I agree with lessig that this form of piracy is immoral, it is poosible to link piracy A and D as long as the motivation for piracy A is in service of piracy D, and sometimes/possibley C. In any case, they all seem to feed one another, i haven’t finished the book, but i hope that your blunt, lessig, opinion of piracy is so black and white. I believe in black and white, and probably finsih the book before i finsih this posting, so i will
jason tar
ps, i think. If my life becomes more enjoyable and “substantial” due to the download of pirated music, without having intentions of duplicating said music, isn’t that worh breaking the law so to speak? I love music, cds are expensive, i have no dsl, just a ghetto stolen wireless signal. Granted, the recent p2p sharing is in the architecture which makes it tedious and slightly long to download albums in their enirity, yet as stated with in chapter 1 or 5, or somewhere in there, piracy as a preview of what you may economically purchase is productive for everyone. This is the end of this rambling which I have forgotten the topic of.
pss. what are lawrence’s view on the intellectual property of aesthetic objects and the plastic arts? Are there standard laws in existence or none whatsoever. This seems the least economical sector of copywrigt infrigement, yet curious as to how these types of physical/mental property are protected by “copiers”. Just curious
jtar
I must note that arcitectural designs do have protection of their designs, yet who is to say that an architectural treasure may be mimiced with slight changes. This seems to fit the mickey mouse analogy, but these are structures of cultural signifigance. Structure mind you, not a drawing of a mouse dancing on a boat. In an industry such as architecture, with a tradition of drawing from, and in many cases directly copying from, the styles and decorative effects of past architecture as a justification for creating such a design. There are progressive architects which are very much so looking into, it is just upsetting that the mainstream public is rarely aware of these architectural advances until decades after their ‘style’ has been defined by culture. wrong newsgroup or what?
As evidently the FC audiobook already spreads itself in torrent… I believe some note in public is due – as for now, the FC audiobook still lacks the “intermediate” intros which are included in the Piracy – Property – Balances parts of the book (p. 17 – 20; p. 83 – 84; p. 211 – 212). As far as I can tell, the above mentioned p2p version which was built upon it… lacks the same.
Audio versions of those missing intros, could be found at the FCwiki version –
http://blogspace.com/freeculture/Spoken_English
Notwithstanding my note above – it’s a good opportunity to thank, at least on my behalf, all the contributors (i.e. the Prof. & friends…) for thinking of, enabling and performing this enjoyable and helpful venture.
As much as I disagree with Mr. Bennett and dislike his style of arguing and his assumptions, I have a difficult time thinking his rants are bad for these discussions. He brings up points that many who are ignorant of the law and the way it works or baised about how the law should be would make. Many of his arguments are pretty good. His review of The Future of Ideas was a mess, but deep down, he seems to have some solid convictions.
It seems to me that silencing dissent is precisely what most posters here are against. If we truly believe in free speech, should we not give Bennett the opportunity to speak his mind?
Mr. Manes, though he makes some decent arguments, is far, far too one sided. His hubris, emotions and monster ego, overshadow his article. Professor Lessig, though your initial response may have been more emotional than normal (note: I would have fared worse and excoriated him), you have the better and the more rational argument. Professor Lessig, let him pick at the margins, in the whole, however, your argument carries the day.
Well, it’s understandable to me that people could get angry about Mr. Lessig’s message. It’s similar (imho) to the reaction that civil rights activists get when they demonstrate against something like racial profiling after 9/11. It’s the “wait a minute… we’re not screwing around here” effect. IP isn’t intangible when it comes to our GDP or our wallets. I myself believe that we need even stronger methods of protection, i.e. effective DRM, but need to work out the balance between the rights of creators ex post vs. ex ante through the political and judicial systems.
Although Mr. Lessig talks a lot about balance, he’s clearly in the leftist camp, and most of the supporters who gather there seem to espouse far more radical views of IP than he or many of his detractors do.
I love Mr. Lessig’s thought-provoking writings, but when I look at the big picture I see the U.S. at odds with the world, and the competition is going to get much much tougher. I also see the FOSS community primarily composed of academicians who have no worries, small companies struggling to make a buck, and big players like IBM just getting tons of value for free. I don’t think it will happen, but I wish the geek community would have an epiphany one of these days and just wonder for a moment whether they’re not being really naive… It’s not a bad thing to be practical…
Again, Mr. Lessig toes an interesting line, ostensibly arguing for balance while garnering the support of many seemingly radical activists… In the end, it might do him better to create a bit of distance there, as I don’t think most people can separate the message from the movement… Or have the supporters I vaguely refer to been purposefully cultivated?
LOL yeah, you should be in my world, it makes dr zeus look plain.
mark
hi all,
I have an extremely stupid and simple question re the Canadian Copyright Act, perhaps someone could help me out: What is the current duration of the protection term for “works made for hire”, that is corporate “authors” ?
I dunno why I didn�t find skimming through?
thanks a lot.
L.
In Canada, a copyright owned by a corporation has a duration that lasts the remainder of the calendar year in which that work is created, plus 50 years. For an individual, the copyright lasts until 50 years after the author’s death.
I just finished reading Free Culture and I intend on emailing a pdf of the book, along with a long letter, to my member of parliment, to the minister of heritage and culture, and to the opposition critics for the minister of heritage and culture.
Right now Canada’s gov’t is under tremendous pressure from American corporate interests to wage copyright war. If we have a chance to avoid such a path, I think now’s the time to step forward and speak up.
yay!
and i’m sure anne would’ve been against this extension of copyright, she was a poet after all….
😀
TragicLad: I thought the same as you, but I couldn’t find a solid reference. Can you provide a reference into either the Copyright Act or to a judicial decision on this?
The only thing I found the Act when I went looking was your description – but it only applied to photographs.
I was also there at the 92nd St. Y on Mar. 23rd, and found it incredibly informative and instructive. Thanks a whole bunch!!!
Suggestion: rename your blog to Larryland!
I don’t have anything substantial to add, but seriously, his Oz-land analogy was unnecessary, childish, dull-witted, and embarrasing before he got through the first paragraph.
EU calls for new copyright law
Stephanie Bodoni, London – 25 April 2004
Copyright holders may soon benefit from a harmonized law on EU-wide licensing deals if a European Commission proposal gets the go-ahead.
In a report published last Monday, which wraps up a seven-year consultation on the issue, the Commission concluded that the management of rights has so far been only marginally addressed by Community law. Member states, says the report, have largely been left to deal with the issue under their national laws.
To ensure a proper functioning of the internal market, especially in the face of increasing demands for EU-wide licences, Community legislation on the collective management of rights has become �highly desirable�.
�Rights holders and commercial users deserve a sound and modern management of these rights,� said internal market commissioner Frits Bolkestein. �That is why it is no longer possible not to address rights management at European level.�
Rights management, which relates to the process of marketing copyright and related rights, can be carried out individually by the rights holder or by a collecting society acting as a trustee.
In a 19-page communication, which concludes a consultation which lasted from 1995 to 2002 on both issues, the Commission found that collective rights management is well established in all member states.
But with rights management becoming an increasing economic, cultural and social necessity in the expanding EU, the Commission asks whether existing methods are hindering the functioning of the internal market.
It has launched an additional consultation to find out if a Community-wide legislation on the collective management of rights would benefit the internal market and what it should look like.
To find out more and see the Commission�s communication,
http://www.europa.eu.int/comm/internal_market/en/intprop/docs/com-2004-261_en.pdf
Gijs Wirtz of Philips said recently at the Dutch Symposium for Author’s Rights that Europe does not want Digital Rights Management, but a better system of levies (what you call collective rights management). He claims that the two systems of rights management oppose each other.
I could not understand much of the minutes of the symposium; it seemed to be about the economic consequences of copyright, and about whether copyright should be changed depending on its economic value. That would seem to me to be a nonsensical question: if copyright is a natural right, then the economic value is irrelevant. And if copyright is there to ensure innovation, then each change to copyright should ultimately be weighed against how good it is for innovation, regardless of whether it has positive or negative economic consequences.
You know… right now… I have never been more proud of being a moron!
Email me if you have further clarification. It’s set me free to become Dr. eventh uhg i’m used to study long , IT” s Freedom . RYHTM.
Finley Peter Dunne’s Mr. Dooley put it this way over a hundred years ago:
Great book. I wish that it was available in print in my country. If I have time I might try to translate sdome of its parts so long as creative commons license permits it
Mr. Manes’s “wildly” colorful speech aside, I find it amusing that he fails to address one of the primary arguments of your book: works in the public domain facilitate the creation of future works. Indeed, it might not be the best proposal that all works immediately fall into the public domain. But there is a reason that copyright expires, in name at least. (whether this is true in function or not is discussed in FOI, and probably a matter which will be debated in future courtroom discussion.)
Not to mention that he has evidently vastly misinterpreted what Lessig has written; this line was my favorite example:
“He seems to think that anything that seems old–never mind whether it is or not–must be in the public domain. And if it isn’t, it should be.”
Are you kidding me? Lessig makes a strong case for the existence of public domain, and some rather liberal suggestions for how long copyrights should exist before their lapse, but never does he suggest everything be in the public domain.
As for myself, I found FOI wonderfully informative. For instance, the bit detailing how copyright management works in the case of the film industry was very enlightening, and an excellent example of just how copyright can cripple the creative expression of future filmmakers.
I will be reading Free Culture online soon, and depending on my enjoyment I shall also be purchasing a dead-tree format copy. But I’m a poor college student, so don’t count on my sponsorship too much 😉
Uhh … don’t you mean George III? There was another president named George, a log time ago. Lots of things used to be named after him. (Posted from Reagan, DC)
Welcome back!!!
hello mr. vaidhyanathan,
welcome!
where can we download a copy of your book for free? the link professor lessig provided connects to amazon.com and those controlling fascists want money for a printed copy we can neither edit nor install on our linux box nor anonymously share with thousands of our “friends.”
surely it cannot be a problem for you – digital copies cost nothing to make and distribute and you get to keep the original files. as you probably know professor lessig has done this with his latest book (but perhaps he trying to make a point instead of a profit.) but please no pdf files – they are so hard to edit and having to use acrobat reader is such an infringement of our rights. ASCII text files would be better.
looking forward to your positive response,
yours truly,
the three blind mice
T.B.Mice: very funny. Why don’t you just wait a few weeks until the non-rights-infringing, non-pdf version appears on p2p networks, from a new friend who is just waiting there to meet you? Or maybe borrow some commercial software that does optical character recognition? There are many options that don’t infringe on your rights to consume.
I got through about 200 pages of Prof. Lessig’s book on my laptop screen, and then decided my eyes were sick of reading it that way and decided to wait until Amazon got my hard copy to me.
http://www.writingonyourpalm.net/column030217.htm
First off, PDF is a horrible format.
While you may not agree with anything Dr. Lessig says, he does have at least one valid point: Copyright *is* hindering innovation. I’m a mobile DJ. Compressed audio technology has presented me with a fantastic opportunity to improve my service, and I’m not talking about piracy. You see, up until a few years ago, I was limited to carrying 800 of my most popular CDs to a gig where they would get scratched, lost, or stolen. Now thanks to MP3, I can carry ALL of my music on a PC and never have to worry about skips, scratches, or loss/theft. With a PC, I am no longer forced to stand in the dark with a flashlight in my mouth trying to find (and hoping I brought) that one CD with that one requested song. Now, I simply perform a search for the requested song and have it cued up in a matter of seconds. And if I don’t own the requested song, I can use my 3G cellular modem to conect to the internet and purchase the song from iTunes or Wal-Mart. This effectively gives me a music library of over 700,000 titles, which should please any customer.
I’m not stealing anything. I am paying the proper groups. The only difference between me and John Q. Public is that I am John Q. Commercial-User. As a commercial user I do not have the right to convert my legally purchased CDs to MP3. iTunes, Wal-Mart, Napster, et al downloads are only for personal use. So even though I pay my dues, I am still a criminal.
What’s that? Mechanical License you say? Sure, I could get a mechanical license and obtain a legal right to archive my CDs and only use the MP3s, but Harry Fox Agency does not license anything less than 500 copies. Even the largest DJ company in the world does not have 500 DJ systems, and I only have one. Why do I need 500 copies? Sure, I still have legal recourse. I can contact each and every publisher to obtain written permission to archive my CDs, but how long do you figure it will take for me to get written permission for the 5000+ CDs I own? Plus, that still won’t help me with iTunes, Wal-Mart, or Napster.
In reality, the current copyright laws have hindered the growth of not just me, but the entire DJ industry.
Sure, I may only make $50k a year, so (as a Harry Fox Agency rep told me) I am small potatoes. But let’s look at some numbers. With approximately 2,327,000 marriages in 2001 (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/marriage.htm) and an assumed average cost of only $500 per wedding dance, even if only half of them hire a mobile DJ we are still talking about $581 Million per year. This doesn’t count the 500,000 high school dances every year, the untold number of company Christmas parties, nor any other special event that a DJ gets hired for. And these numbers only deal with mobile DJs! As you see, in a multi-billion dollar industry I am small potatoes.
Oh, and did anyone mention that DJs in Canada have been paying a $250 fee to get this right for the last 6 years? Tell me again how perfect the US Copyright Law is? And while you’re at it, tell me about that ocean front property in Arizona and that bridge you have for sale…
Tim, who are you responding to? Your post seems out of nowhere, other than the first line about pdf.
I was responding to three blind mice. No one had responded when I first started posting. I just type slower than John S. TBM had nothing good to say (but his sarcasm is humorous), ergo the assumption that he doesn’t agree with anything Dr. Lessig says. I point out that Dr. Lessig does have at least one good point, and then I offer my situation as evidence of that point. I was perhaps a bit verbose and possibly went off tangent a bit, but I hope you’ll forgive me since it is my real-life situation. 😉
hey, please, lessig is not a “Dr.” (though I think Siva is).
oh please — I still type with just 4 or 5 fingers. You type *more* than me. That is more accurate.
I think Dr. Vaidhyanathan is a professor of communication at NYU… that’s what my memory recalls from his jacket of his first book.
Give me an e-mail to send it to you. Do whatever you want with it. Any format you want. Whatever. The printed pages are better quality than any electronic version, of course. They have been fully edited. And the battery never runs out.
If you want the best quality file and find $20 too much to pay for my book, your local public library should have it on the shelf in a few weeks. That’s my favorite free culture site.
Siva
Greetings Siva:
A spirited debate went down at the Future of Music Coaltion lunchtime meeting, and one thing I made a note about. I resonated with your comment on machines taking over the judgement of copyright authority. We certainly have previously discussed that when future software goes obsolete, we may not be able to undo the locks on a particular piece of culture.
But I dig your comment that copyright maximalists no longer trust human judgement but rather choose to rely on rigid machines!
Cheers, and best of luck. I bought the book, I will blog my reaction.
TOM BARGER
Welcome, Siva.
A couple of years ago I was told by a colleague that Lessig’s name was brought up at a Congressional hearing and that whoever was speaking at the time (whether Congress critter or witness, I don’t know) made a dismissive offhand comment that he was some kind of kook. I made some attempts to see if the comment ever got into the record, but to no avail. If someone in Congress ever made such a comment about me, I’d wear it like a badge of honor. It’s a good sign if your arguments are solid enough to leave the opposition no recourse but to go into a tizzy.
A few weeks ago, Lessig went “into a tizzy” about the Manes review of his book, Free Culture. I guess that means Manes was right and Lessig was wrong; after all, “It�s a good sign if your arguments are solid enough to leave the opposition no recourse but to go into a tizzy.”
Lessig was “into a tizzy” because Manes was using bogus statistics to set up arguments. At least that was one of the many complaints he pointed out.
“I know this because the maximalists are sinking to ad hominem attacks.”
/pot calling kettle black
it is humourous to say the least to sit back and watch this name calling. one side is “maximalist,” “extremist” the other side is “radically rational, madly moderate.”
professor lessig continually markets his views as balanced and moderate when to some reasonable people (such as ourselves) they appear anything but balanced and moderate.
and now we’re doing it! what temerity to call ourselves reasonable when disagreeing with the majority sentiment in this blog.
sir we are very much looking forward to reading your book and despite our sarcastic comments in an earlier thread about wanting to download it for free, we have no doubt that it will be well worth the money. anyone who takes the time to write thoughtfully about these things – regardless of the views they express – deserves support.
while we hope to never see a day when professor’s lessig’s “free culture” vision become reality, he has a few (a very few in our humble opinion) valid points to make. it would be wrong to dismiss him entirely. similarly, it would be wrong for you to dismiss the “maximalists” because they also have valid points to make.
in the clash of individual rights there is never one right answer. there will always be tension.
the mice support original creators and inventors, and look with derision upon those who claim rights to that which they themsleves did not create or invent.
Hi Siva
Unfortunately, yes, I think you hang around too many people who actually read the books they criticize. You’re a professor. Academics are *supposed* to be polite. Not that they always are. But there is a strong cultural belief there, as evident in what you’re writing, that ad-hominem arguments are “wrong”. Again, it may be honored more in the breech than in the observance, it may be an ideal not always practiced, but it’s part of the formal codes of conduct.
Hang out with lawyers and lobbyists and politicians more. To them, lying and smearing and ad-hominem attacks are *tactics*, debate *options*. Whether they use those approaches depends entirely on whether they think they can get away with it, that it’ll work with the audience. It’s a pure strategic calculation. They may decide they’ll look bad if they lie. They may decide it’s worth it. Situations vary. But the truth or intellectual strength of the argument bears a very tenuous relationship to the approaches employed.
I certainly don’t see any change at all, in terms of Jack “Boston Strangler” Valenti style rhetoric.
And remember, a mosquito is slammed hard, but that doesn’t mean it’s powerful and influential.
So you can’t derive “panic” from any of it. It may be that you just happened to run into a few people who think meanness is the way to go.
If the courts had been rebuffing the copyright extensions and the DMCA, then there might be panic. Otherwise, it’s simply tactics.
One almost expects Manes to start ending his posts: UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT
information is ENCOURAGED!
Lessig, not so much.
To “three blind mice”,
Regarding your last statement, in the U.S., the
copyright law (Section 121) allows blind people
or people with disabilities, through authorized
entities, to convert the original format of the
copyrighted works to a different format such
as Braille that they can use. In all of these
conversions, authors and artists get nothing – no
royalty, no penny, no dime, no money. Do you look
on them with derision who have the right to convert
them to a different format?
Do you also look on people (apparently excluding yourself)
with derision that use works and inventions whose
protection (copyright or patent) has expired?
Do you also look on people with derision who go
to libraries in the U.S. to borrow books instead
of buying them while the authors and artists get
no money from them? (In United Kingdom, libraries
pay royalty to authors and artists based on the
usage of their works in libraries.)
And so on.
Joseph Pietro Riolo
<[email protected]>
Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions
in this comment in the public domain.
Now is the time for all good progressives, democrats, liberals, conservatives with open minds to call Disneyland, Disneyland stores, Disneyworld, boycott all Disney products and let these people know that this will not be tolerated! Also please write to AINTITCOOLNEWS:COM and let them know what is going on and that it must be stopped!
——————————–
Here’s the article:
May 5, 2004
Disney Forbidding Distribution of Film That Criticizes Bush
By JIM RUTENBERG
ASHINGTON, May 4 ? The Walt Disney Company is blocking its Miramax division from distributing a new documentary by Michael Moore that harshly criticizes President Bush, executives at both Disney and Miramax said Tuesday.
The film, “Fahrenheit 911,” links Mr. Bush and prominent Saudis ? including the family of Osama bin Laden ? and criticizes Mr. Bush’s actions before and after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Disney, which bought Miramax more than a decade ago, has a contractual agreement with the Miramax principals, Bob and Harvey Weinstein, allowing it to prevent the company from distributing films under certain circumstances, like an excessive budget or an NC-17 rating.
Executives at Miramax, who became principal investors in Mr. Moore’s project last spring, do not believe that this is one of those cases, people involved in the production of the film said. If a compromise is not reached, these people said, the matter could go to mediation, though neither side is said to want to travel that route.
In a statement, Matthew Hiltzik, a spokesman for Miramax, said: “We’re discussing the issue with Disney. We’re looking at all of our options and look forward to resolving this amicably.”
But Disney executives indicated that they would not budge from their position forbidding Miramax to be the distributor of the film in North America. Overseas rights have been sold to a number of companies, executives said.
“We advised both the agent and Miramax in May of 2003 that the film would not be distributed by Miramax,” said Zenia Mucha, a company spokeswoman, referring to Mr. Moore’s agent. “That decision stands.”
Disney came under heavy criticism from conservatives last May after the disclosure that Miramax had agreed to finance the film when Icon Productions, Mel Gibson’s company, backed out.
Mr. Moore’s agent, Ari Emanuel, said Michael D. Eisner, Disney’s chief executive, asked him last spring to pull out of the deal with Miramax. Mr. Emanuel said Mr. Eisner expressed particular concern that it would endanger tax breaks Disney receives for its theme park, hotels and other ventures in Florida, where Mr. Bush’s brother, Jeb, is governor.
“Michael Eisner asked me not to sell this movie to Harvey Weinstein; that doesn’t mean I listened to him,” Mr. Emanuel said. “He definitely indicated there were tax incentives he was getting for the Disney corporation and that’s why he didn’t want me to sell it to Miramax. He didn’t want a Disney company involved.”
Disney executives deny that accusation, though they said their displeasure over the deal was made clear to Miramax and Mr. Emanuel.
A senior Disney executive elaborated that the company had the right to quash Miramax’s distribution of films if it deemed their distribution to be against the interests of the company. The executive said Mr. Moore’s film is deemed to be against Disney’s interests not because of the company’s business dealings with the government but because Disney caters to families of all political stripes and believes Mr. Moore’s film, which does not have a release date, could alienate many.
“It’s not in the interest of any major corporation to be dragged into a highly charged partisan political battle,” this executive said.
Miramax is free to seek another distributor in North America, but such a deal would force it to share profits and be a blow to Harvey Weinstein, a big donor to Democrats.
Mr. Moore, who will present the film at the Cannes film festival this month, criticized Disney’s decision in an interview on Tuesday, saying, “At some point the question has to be asked, `Should this be happening in a free and open society where the monied interests essentially call the shots regarding the information that the public is allowed to see?’ “
Mr. Moore’s films, like “Roger and Me” and “Bowling for Columbine,” are often a political lightning rod, as Mr. Moore sets out to skewer what he says are the misguided priorities of conservatives and big business. They have also often performed well at the box office. His most recent movie, “Bowling for Columbine,” took in about $22 million in North America for United Artists. His books, like “Stupid White Men,” a jeremiad against the Bush administration that has sold more than a million copies, have also been lucrative.
Mr. Moore does not disagree that “Fahrenheit 911” is highly charged, but he took issue with the description of it as partisan. “If this is partisan in any way it is partisan on the side of the poor and working people in this country who provide fodder for this war machine,” he said.
Mr. Moore said the film describes financial connections between the Bush family and its associates and prominent Saudi Arabian families that go back three decades. He said it closely explores the government’s role in the evacuation of relatives of Mr. bin Laden from the United States immediately after the 2001 attacks. The film includes comments from American soldiers on the ground in Iraq expressing disillusionment with the war, he said.
Mr. Moore once planned to produce the film with Mr. Gibson’s company, but “the project wasn’t right for Icon,” said Alan Nierob, an Icon spokesman, adding that the decision had nothing to do with politics.
Miramax stepped in immediately. The company had distributed Mr. Moore’s 1997 film, “The Big One.” In return for providing most of the new film’s $6 million budget, Miramax was positioned to distribute it.
While Disney’s objections were made clear early on, one executive said the Miramax leadership hoped it would be able to prevail upon Disney to sign off on distribution, which would ideally happen this summer, before the election and when political interest is high.
Here’s the link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/05/national/05DISN.html?ei=5006&en=89982416bdce50c0&ex=1084334400&partner=ALTAVISTA1&pagewanted=print&posit
Posted by Gremlin at May 5, 2004 08:07 AM
Mice: I did not write Shakespeare’s plays — would you think it wrong of me to publish copies of them?
Lessig really needs to get out and speak to these people more. I attended the debate between Lessig and DeLong on the day of his book release. Leaving the debate, my colleagues were all astonished at how rational and well-spoken he was. They made comments about how they were embarresed to find themselves agreeing with him. They were surprised at how non-kooky he really was. They still live in the tainted world we in Washington live in, but that one appearance went a long way to changing the way people think about him and the free culture movement.
The problem with the anonymity of the Internet is that no one knows who you are. People are comforted by seeing that a person looks and talks like a normal human being. The eloquence and grace of many of those I’ve met tend to exceed my expectations and far exceed those of my colleagues.
Siva, Larry, and others need to come to Washington and meet face to face with those in our cold city more often. It may be the only way to get the point across.
cowardice or complicity? Disney seems to be advancing the verticle integration of it’s interests with those of the right wing machine that now has a created a choke hold on information flow. With any luck at all they can become the state appointed long form content company.
All this talk about Michael Moore reminds me of
my favorite TV clip from this year (at the Oscars):
Click here to view it
http://www.rightsideredux.com/archives/2004_05_01_archive.html#108373139921022829
Justin @ RSR
“It’s time to choose our words and tactics carefully so this movement grows.”
Ehhh … Is there anyone reading here who, *themselves*, is going to say:
“Before, I thought the right tactic was to expose the copyrapist corpscum for what they are, but now I am enlightened and realize it is a matter of all good men and women reasoning together”?
I’d be happy if we could achieve not killing OURSELVES in liberal/radical infighting, much less having everyone play nice 🙂
Rather than cowardice or complicity, how about good ol’ freedom. It’s no secret that there has been a fairly quiet campaign by many family oriented Christian organizations to complain to Disney about this movie.
Disney is clearly responding to the market…their right by the way just as it is their customers’ right to not patronize Disney if they dislike what they do.
Disney is not submarining this movie, they are just saying they don’t want to be involved with it (their right, again).
Moore’s claim that Disney is killing the movie is, like much of what he write/produces…not true.
I agree with Alan. Why should Disney be obliged to finance a highly partisan diatribe? Disney clearly has a brand to protect, why shouldn’t they protect it? Would they be obliged to produce a film from the far right? no.
The point is that Miramax bought the rights to distribute his movie, then the parent company stepped in at the last minute and overrode them. That in my book is “killing the movie”, don’t know what book others might be reading.
And of course it’s all perfectly legal, and perfectly understandable, why Disney did it. It also stinks to high heaven. Here we have a major corporation making decisions on what films will be released to the public based (allegedly) on how it might affect their tax breaks (which of course they deny, what else would they say?).
And they have succeeded in getting the movie killed at Miramax. Family-oriented Christian organizations are now to be the arbiters of what movies will be released in America, at least at Disney-owned studios. That’s the message here. Better not make any movies that go against the beliefs of family-oriented Christian organizations, or at any rate don’t pitch them to Disney, the family-oriented Christian movie company!
Personally I wouldn’t be surprised if Moore saw this coming, but took a chance that he might be able to slide one in “under the radar” of the parent company. It’s no-lose for him: his film is going to Cannes regardless, and some other distributor will eventually distribute it. Meanwhile he’s exposed the sham of Miramax’ independence from Disney.
It’s one thing if Disney simply made a marketing decision not to distribute the movie because it would anger some consumers and hurt its sales elsewhere. But if their “business decision” is based on the fear that they might upset Governor Jeb Bush and lose tax breaks they now enjoy in Florida (as the NYT article suggests), then it’s something else entirely. Alan, is your idea of “freedom” about receiving corporate welfare in exchange of suppressing political dissent?
I like to think the movement will grow if its principles are seen as worthy of support regardless of the strident mudslinging from the opposition. However, it is increasingly evident to me that the majority of Americans are more impressed with one-liners and zingers than with reasoned arguments and detailed debates. You score more points by saying “lessig’s an idiot” than you do with saying “lessig is mistaken”. It’s the world of the WWF, Jerry Springer and Average Joe Millionaire Survivor, and the radical conservatives have mastered playing by its rules.
With regards to being divisive…anything said in opposition is by definition divisive. It’s just a question of how you go about being divisive, appealing to emotion or appealing to reason or some blending of the two, that determines whether people will think of you as an intellectual or as a crackpot. On this blog I hope we will at least lean towards the intellectual over the emotional.
Rob writes, “anything said in opposition is by definition divisive”.
You bring up an interesting idea, but I think you may have overlooked some options. There are ways of pointing out alternate viewpoints that, when considered with an existing statement, can help to bring about change.
I think that emotion is a good initial motivator that can help propel someone’s intellect to take action.
I think action in many cases, whatever the motive, is likely to appeal to people.
It turns out that this is a hyped-up story manufactured out of thin air by Moore to create some interest in an otherwise dull project. See The Nation* columnist Marc Cooper’s explanation and inside scoop on a story coming out in The Independent* tomorrow.
Can we spell “shameless self-promoter?”
*Not right-wing publications.
Siva writes, “Back in 1998, when … the copyright cartels got everything they asked for….”.
1998 was a bad year – the 1998 DMCA, the 1998 CTEA.
But as far as I can tell, the copyright cartels are still getting everything they ask for. Witness the continued attempts to add copy protection to CDs, the growing use of digital rights management software (Apple iTunes; Microsoft Janus), the DirectTV ‘guilty until proven innocent’ smart card suits, the 2002 loss in MPAA v. Corley, the 2003 loss in Eldred v Ashcroft, the 2003 FCC broadcast flag.
The argument that this movie could cost Disney tax breaks presumes corruption on the part of Florida. When did tax breaks become partisan rewards?
Speaking of avoiding language that causes offense, be careful with the use of “creative communities” to describe only those whose creations are artistic and literary, as opposed to technical. Besides the fact that a lot of geeks resent it, it builds unnecessary walls. Many on Jack Valenti’s side of the divide treasure their creative freedom and fight like dogs against any who would block it. They would never dream of permitting a system in which every film had to be approved by the state, but they are advocating a system in which every program has to be approved by the state, because a lot of them think that all programs come either from faceless corporations like Microsoft or from criminal vandals.
We software creators need to insist that “creative” applies to us.
Why call Michael Moore’s film propaganda without seeing it first?
This guy speaks more truth in a day than Bush has in the past 3 years.
What do they have on this guy? What, that he gets a couple minor facts wrong in his book? So what? He’s not a professional journalist. Doesn’t claim to be. It’s much worse, in my opinion, when “professionals” like Bernard Goldberg publish pure lies.
You spammed the RSS with your republishing. Look at Detod blawgs
Siva,
Let’s hope that the power of ideas will be persuasive enough to bring some positive changes to the copyright law eventually. I’d hate to think that the only way to counter the recent trend in copyright law would be to raise millions in lobbying and PAC money (like the film and recording industries do), to “outbid” them in their (successful) attempts to influence lawmakers. … But, maybe it will require that route also.
I’ve yet to see anything Moore has done that’s been dull. Of course there’s always the possibility that anything touching on President Bush will be affected by his dullness, but I bet Moore is up to the task of making even the President seem somehow interesting.
As far as Mr. Cooper’s supposed debunking of Moore, I notice that the “inside scoop” article he includes nevertheless repeats the quote from the NYTimes from Moore’s agent where the tax incentives supposedly came up in a conversation with Michael Eisner; that indicates to me that the author feels it’s good info, and Cooper (by including it) does as well. He also cites nameless “sources” at Miramax reporting that Miramax also “never planned to release the Moore film”. Well, gee, I’m convinced. As with Manes, points for Cooper using “bloviating” (which is fast becoming one of my favorite words); but my statements still stand.
From the Cooper blog entry:
Well of course they didn’t; but Moore wasn’t dealing with Disney, was he? He thought he was dealing with Miramax. Oops. Cooper even points this out himself, with emphasis:
I can spell “shameless self-promoter” any number of ways. M-a-r-c-C-o-o-p-e-r. G-e-o-r-g-e-B-u-s-h. The list is endless. And citing one shameless self-promoter to attempt to discredit another is not likely to be very convincing.
I would guess about the time monied interests decided to try to influence government. Ancient Rome maybe? Probably even earlier. Naivete’ is so charming sometimes.
Miramax is a producer, and they have a deal with Disney for distribution. When Miramax decided to produce Moore’s latest piece of puke, Disney said they wouldn’t distribute it. That was a year ago, and none of this is news to Moore, who even acknowledges that his agent knew about the deal all along but somehow failed to tell him until this week.
There are plenty of distributors who would love to handle this film, and Moore won’t suffer by using someone other than Disney to pawn his dreck off on the unsuspecting young people who make up his core audience.
The only story here is Moore lying (again) in order to create buzz for his irrational, dishonest, hysterical attacks on Authority.
(Yawn)
And in other news, Roy Disney says Disney Inc. is being privateered by someone with a Letter of Marquee…
Ok, he didn’t SAY that, but…
Moore accused of publicity stunt over Disney ‘ban’
Less than 24 hours after accusing the Walt Disney Company of pulling the plug on his latest documentary in a blatant attempt at political censorship, the rabble-rousing film-maker Michael Moore has admitted he knew a year ago that Disney had no intention of distributing it.
The admission, during an interview with CNN, undermined Moore’s claim that Disney was trying to sabotage the US release of Fahrenheit 911 just days before its world premiere at the Cannes film festival.
Instead, it lent credence to a growing suspicion that Moore was manufacturing a controversy to help publicise the film, a full-bore attack on the Bush administration and its handling of national security since the attacks of 11 September 2001.
You’ve been had, boys and girls.
Nothing new here. It still doesn’t negate the fact that Eisner/Disney made their decision on what I consider a dubious basis. And it still is a fact that Disney indeed did “pull the plug” on distributing the movie, making good on their threat. It’s their right to decide what not to distribute, but it’s the public’s right to demand that a major movie distributor give equal time to all points of view. If Disney wants to exercise such control over the political content of their projects and those of their subsidiaries (censorship is such an ugly word), that fact needs to be out in the open so the public can see it. And now it is.
Rob writes: …it�s the public�s right to demand that a major movie distributor give equal time to all points of view.
It is?
The issue here is Moore lying to create buzz, and you buying the lies because of your predisposition to accept any line of reasoning that attacks authority; this is what sells Moore’s books (and Lessig’s, and Vaidhyanathan’s, and Franken’s, etc, etc, etc).
I agree that you’re being manipulated, and suggest that you look at such questions as “how” and “by whom.” When you know the truth, you’ll be free.
The Future of Music Coalition Summit was great. I got a lot out of it, and enjoyed all the debate surrounding the copyright and digital delivery sessions. Thanks for taking the time to participate.
What’s really worrisome is that Disney acts in a similar way against political and so-called “indecent” speech in television, where it is one of only a handful of companies that control access to the public airwaves. As a theatrical film by a well-known filmmaker, Moore’s film will be distributed by someone else after Disney’s pass. And the public can choose whether to pay its seven bucks to see it.
But in television, the likelihood of a show that Disney, through its production companies, bankrolls but then refuses to air eventually finding another broadcast outlet are slim and none. Unless it’s by a producer with the juice of a Jerry Bruckheimer who can stand up to them and demand his show back (as was the case with CSI, where ABC famously passed and thus handed a goldmine to CBS/Viacom). It’s where our public airwaves are concerned that we ought to be most concerned. The giant conglomerates who we allow to control these airwaves are so dependent on Washington for licenses, spectrum, merger approvals, tax breaks, etc., that we all pay a price in homogenized, unchallenging, and politically “safe” programming.
Clear Channel dropping Howard Stern from its stations was an excellent example — it was getting killed in Washington, so it sacrificed Howard. Now, the question is whether Viacom will dump Stern, as he himself is predicting. If so, we’ve got a major, major problem in this country. In fact, we have one already.
I just read an excellent (my opinion) essay by scientist/author David Brin:
The Matrix: Tomorrow May Be Different
Mostly the essay is about overarching themes in speculative fiction and their relevance to society, but it also has quite a bit of relevance to your point. Here’s a quote (apologies in advance for losing some of its context) from that essay:
Perhaps I have been manipulated to suspect Authority. I don’t claim to be immune to propaganda. Given that admission, I certainly feel in my heart that large media conglomerates are heavily predisposed to use their power in purely selfish ways. The people running them aren’t superhuman either; they may genuinely feel that releasing Moore’s film would be harmful to society, but that’s not the story I’m hearing. Instead I’m hearing that Authority is deciding to silence an annoying dissenter who questions their power and the moral underpinnings of that power. I feel I must respectfully disagree with their position.
The public has just as much right to demand equality of time from a media megalith as it does from an individual television network or newspaper. It is OUR society, not Authority’s, though Authority would perhaps like us to forget that.
Actually, we don’t have a problem with access to the airwaves at all. Most of us watch TV on cable or satellite – 70% or so of American households – so the airwaves and their regulators are at best a minor nuisance.
Progress is a wonderful thing.
Rob, may I point out that Authority isn’t actually a monolith? It seems to me that it’s helpful to remember that, especially in the political context where using one oligarchy to fight another is the order of the day.
In the most real and important sense, you yourself are the only Authority that matters.
I think these arguments can co-exist, as long as Mr. Lessig doesn�t assert that the architecture itself is a basic organizing principle. Clearly, it�s true that the architecture flows from the applications we implement or want to implement on the network.
The distinction here is in the characterization of the initial architecture. I don�t know what the initial architects of the network were thinking. I believe Mr. Lessig may have characterized the initial network as having been created with the goal of a freedom supporting architecture in mind. If that�s the case, it may be incorrect � my inclination would be to believe the engineer�s motives to be simplicity, efficiency, practicality, and the achievement of the objectives at the time, rather than any �free architecture�� I would tend to think the sense that this architecture supported freedom is a realization that came later, and probably not one that was a goal of the architects ex ante.
Isn’t this wonderful? How I’d like to live in a country where large corporations understand that giving something away (or so cheap, it’s almost free) can actually be *good* for business. Or haven’t they twigged that lots of people won’t need to steal if the value proposition is right?
I heard you speak at the library conference in Phoenix. It was eye-opening, mind-opening, witty–excellent! I feel like I’m beginning to understand something that I never quite got before. (Sherman Alexie also likes to speak to librarians. He blew the roof off the Pacific Northwest Library Association conference last fall.)
I’ll bite — ought to be thought what?
I agree with another commenter here, this is *good* publicity for Lessig’s cause. His rebuttal here is only possible because of the original attack.
Larry, I think this kind of forum is one of the best ways for you to present your arguments; by themselves they make for dry and abstract reasoning, but against an actual opponent, with specific examples, and against the kind of rhetoric that the Disney crowd is used to generating, your arguments come to life and are more persuasive.
“I�ll bite � ought to be thought what?”
Ought to be REthought. Sheesh.
Absolutely. It’s important to listen up on this sort of stuff.
I have to say though…although I don’t want to admit it… the line can be somewhat thin,
If you catch my drift, 😉
The best thing Kerry has going for him is George W Bush. If it weren’t for him I don’t think Kerry could win. Did you notice how Kerry’s silence on the torture issue shot him into the lead? That’s just where this is all going. The Plame issue is not dead either. When a Pres hires an outside criminal lawyer he’s usually in trouble.
I wanted Dean–still do, but I want to put the W back in Crawford even more. Guess who gets my vote?
Perhaps I grossly misinterpreted your march 20th response to Stephen Manes, but I wouldn’t describe your response as “blustering and bloviating”, or “bloggy rage” (Forbes, April 4th, 2004). Hmmm….
If you’re response can be characterized as rage, then what of Manes two articles! The ratio of argumentative premises to rhetoric and name-calling is at best 50%…Someone’s upset, and it may not even be Manes, seeing as how he writes mostly about digital camera features and the like. Perhaps his editor told him to put you in your place….”Lessig is moron”? Please.
I certainly agree with you Karl. And the unfortunate thing is that it hurts Manes own argument, which has merit. For example, he essentially is arguing that putting the burden of obtaining copyrights on the author unfairly burdens creators, and “might help the big media he claims to detest by offering them the chance to poach material they once would have had to pay for” (Forbes, March 29th, 2004).
The argument here is atleast plausible. He is ignoring of course, the opposite side of the issue, that if the burden is not on creators to protect their own work, then it falls (as it does currently) on follow-on creators and innovators to seek permission, oftentimes for works that rightly, should be in the public domain.
Nevertheless, most reasonable people, in my view, would not read this article after the first few completely unnecessary paragraphs of insulting language (unless they completely believe the writers view). It damages the writers own credibility more than anything else.
5th black senator in history, 3rd black to run for president, and first to win.
“3rd black to run for president”
Err no…
3rd President from Illinois? (If you don’t count Ronald Regan…) Lincoln, Grant, and Regan so far…
3rd black senator since reconstruction, 5th black senator ever, 1st black president. Oh, wait, but that wouldn’t be 3rd and 1st at the same time.
I give up! Please answer the Sunday puzzle!
Obama is America!
He’s Black! He’s White! He’s the child of an immigrant and a native born citizen. He is an Ivy School graduate, from a middle class family. He has a wife with movie star good looks and two beautiful daughters. All he need now to make him complete is a scandal developed by the right wing to overcome his perfectly clean image. Once he’s eliminated that hurdle he will be a candidate for President in earnest.
Correct answer: 3rd black senator.
We had
1st 1966 Edward W. Brooke/Massachusetts
and
2nd 1982 Carol Moseley Braun/Illinois.
And now Obama as the 3rd…
If it’s “3rd and 1st in the same year” then he can’t be referring to being the 3rd black senator… and he’s the 5th black senator anyway. Two were elected between 1870 and 1881, and two more since the mid-sixties. See the CBC history page.
I’d guess it’s something nuanced about the nomination, like the 3rd black presidential candidate to win a major party primary or caucus, something like that. I know Jesse Jackson has carried states for the nomination before, I’m not sure who else has.
Excuse, he will be the 5th black Senator.
I’m guessing he’ll be the third U.S. citizen born overseas to seek the nomination of a major party (the other two are Romney and McCain), as well as the first to seek such nomination as a democrat (the other two were Republicans). This is the only answer that does not depend on him actually winning the senate election in 2004, or the democratic nomination in 2012.
Sorry, I meant the 3rd after reconstruction. Before that we had Hiram R. Revels (1870) and Blanche K. Bruce (1874).
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Black senators:
Hiram R. Revels, MS, 1870 to 1871
Blanche K. Bruce, MS, 1875 to 1881
Edward W. Brooke, MA, 1967 to 1979
Carol Moseley Braun, IL, 1993 to 1999
Barack Obama, IL, 2005 to . . .
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“Please say free-of-charge when you mean that, since the book is not free in a Stallman sense.”
Great. Can you forward us all a copy of the Stallman dictionary, so that we can all adjust our speech accordingly?
Did Stallman slap a GPL on the English language when I wasn’t looking?
Free is free. Stallman’s ironic attempts to control this idea, notwithstanding.
List_of_former_United_States_Senators
In case anyone is interested in history after reading those comments…
2012 never made sense. What is the 3d? I doubt Shirley Chisholm carried any state primaries, and I know Carol Moseley Braun and Al Sharpton did not.
Does anyone know how the copyright law relates to recordings of songs in the public domain? If the recording CAN be copyrighted, how long does the protection last?
LL’s final Free Culture presentation presented a set of life changing ideas parallel to my unarticulated concerns. It has introduced me to Creative Commons and have now listened to the audio-book derivative version.
It is a inspiring, thankyou to Professor Lessig and everyone else involved.
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