Digital Lock Legislation

What you should know about Canada's proposed new copryright legislation.

The foundational principle of the new bill remains that anytime a digital lock is used - whether on books, movies, music, or electronic devices - the lock trumps virtually all other rights. In other words, in the battle between two sets of property rights - those of the intellectual property rights holder and those of the consumer who has purchased the tangible or intangible property - the IP rights holder always wins. This represents market intervention for a particular business model by a government supposedly committed to the free market and it means that the existing fair dealing rights (including research, private study, news reporting, criticism, and review) and the proposed new rights (parody, satire, education, time shifting, format shifting, backup copies) all cease to function effectively so long as the rights holder places a digital lock on their content or device.

Piracy of Anti-Piracy

So Warner is getting sued by a German company for stealing anti-piracy tech. Hilarity!

'Why I Steal Movies, Even Ones I'm In'

Peter Serafinowicz - an actor, write and director - writes about why he steals movies via torrents.

Like a billion other people, I download things illegally. I'm also an actor, writer and director whose income depends on revenue from DVDs, movies and books. This leads to many conflicts in my head, in my heart, and in bars.

Downfall

I've been sitting on this story for at least a week, trying to find the proper article to link here. Basically, there is a movie about Hitler called 'Downfall' and one particular scene in it is often used to create parodies by changing the subtitles so that Hitler, instead of talking about historical Hitler things, instead rants about Kanye West or his birthday being ruined. They are comedic and satirical, and they started to vanish, despite the film's director and writer/producer being flattered by the parodies and thinking they are funny. At the end of the article is an example of a Downfall parody, this time with Hitler reacting to all the Downfall parodies.

Automatic Copyright Protection and YouTube

Sometimes automatic copyright protection doesn't work so well, like when videos are banned for using the same freely-provided music in an editing program.

ACTA and the Internet

How ACTA Will Change the Internet, via Boing Boing.

...ACTA goes way, way beyond the TRIPS (the copyright/patent/trademark stuff in the World Trade Organization agreement), creating an entirely new realm of liability for people who provide services on the net. Since liability for service-providers determines what kind of services we get, increasing their liability for copyright infringement will make it harder to invent new tools like web-lockers, online video-hosting services, blogging services, and anything else that's capable of being used to infringe copyright.

ACTA Provisions on Injuctions and Damages, for reference.

With Enough Libraries, All Content is Free

From Jessamyn West:

“With enough libraries, all content is free.” That is to say… if the world was one big library and we all had interlibrary loan at that library, we could lend anything to anyone. The funding structures of libraries currently mean that in many cases we’re duplicating [and paying for] content that we could be sharing. This is at the heart of a lot of the copyright battles of today and, to my mind, what’s really behind the EBSCO/Gale/vendors. Time Magazine is losing money and not having a good plan for keeping their income level up, decides to offer exclusive contracts to vendors and allows them to bid. EBSCO wins, Gale loses. Any library not using EBSCO loses. Patrons lose and don’t even know they’ve lost.

Confessions of a Book Pirate

An article from The Millions about everything you wanted to know about book piracy. Maybe not everything, but still quite a bit. The Millions, an online literary magazine, interviewed a book pirate who goes by the name 'The Real Caterpillar'.

Just because someone downloads a file, it does not mean they would have bought the product I think this is the key fact that many people in the music industry ignore – a download does not translate to a lost sale. I own hundreds of paper copies of books I have e-copies of, many of which were bought after downloading the e-copy. In other cases I have downloaded books I would never have purchased, simply because they were recommended or sounded interesting.

For the Love of Culture, Google, Copyright and our Future

I can't really package this any better than the site I got it from, BoingBoing. This is one of those links that's also a placeholder for me so I can go back and read later; this one is long: For the Love of Culture, Google, Copyright and our Future. I'm so cheap I'm even grabbing the same quote BoingBoing did:

Whatever your view of it, notice first just how different this future promises to be. In real libraries, in real space, access is not metered at the level of the page (or the image on the page). Access is metered at the level of books (or magazines, or CDs, or DVDs). You get to browse through the whole of the library, for free. You get to check out the books you want to read, for free. The real-space library is a den protected from the metering of the market. It is of course created within a market; but like kids in a playroom, we let the life inside the library ignore the market outside.

This freedom gave us something real. It gave us the freedom to research, regardless of our wealth; the freedom to read, widely and technically, beyond our means. It was a way to assure that all of our culture was available and reachable--not just that part that happens to be profitable to stock. It is a guarantee that we have the opportunity to learn about our past, even if we lack the will to do so. The architecture of access that we have in real space created an important and valuable balance between the part of culture that is effectively and meaningfully regulated by copyright and the part of culture that is not. The world of our real-space past was a world in which copyright intruded only rarely, and when it did, its relationship to the objectives of copyright was relatively clear.

We forget all this today.

Critical Commons Videos

From BoingBoing:

"Critical Commons... is a fair use advocacy and media sharing site, funded by the MacArthur Foundation. This is currently the most radical media-sharing site on the open internet. Designed for media educators and students, Critical Commons makes high-quality, copyrighted media publicly available by placing it in a critical context and informing users about their rights under fair use."

This is a fun site to poke around.

LISNews: Ten Stories That Shaped 2009

LISNews has helpfully posted a list of their Ten Stories That Shaped 2009. The ten stories cover censorship (like the whole League of Extraordinary Gentlemen saga), e-books and Orwell, the decline of newspapers, Wikipedia, video games in libraries, the death of anti-censorship advocate Judith Krug, good ol' bookless Cushing, the Google Books settlement, Twilight's New Moon mania, and the economy and libraries. In the span of three months, Megducation has covered at least half these topics. That's pretty good for such a recent project. Now if only anyone read this!

Who Has the Rights to Old Books?

More continuing e-book drama! William Styron's family believes they own the rights to his books since they were first published before e-books existed. Random House, Styron's publisher, disagrees and intends to get some more cash off those e-books.

Is this being handled like a regular copyright? If a book goes out of print, does the owner of copyright change? Is Random House being legitimate here? My gut feeling says no.

And now, because I have an exam on Tuesday, here is a list of who can hold copyright:

• the creator
• the employer
• the commissioner
  
• someone else the rights have been transferred to

And here are some things that are not protected by copyright:

• slogans
• themes
• ideas
• names

In Canada, copyright generally expires after 50 years. The copyright offices are located in the Library of Congress.

Danish DVD Ripper

From Boing Boing: 'In Denmark, it's legal to make copies of commercial videos for backup or other private purposes. It's also illegal to break the DRM that restricts copying of DVDs. Deciding to find out which law mattered, Henrik Anderson reported himself for 100 violations of the DRM-breaking law (he ripped his DVD collection to his computer) and demanded that the Danish anti-piracy Antipiratgruppen do something about.'

The Library of Congress' Digital Collection and a Plea for Steve Guttenberg's Help

Google Books, Project Gutenberg, and the Library of Congress; all three are scanning collections to be stored digitally. The Library of Congress is up to 700 terabytes of data, though only 200 are available on the internet due to copyright. (A terabyte is still a lot, trust me.)

Do people have the same problems with the LIC scanning as they do with Google? Does Project Gutenburg? Has anyone considered the merits of consolidating all three collections under the LIC or Gutenburg?

I'd say collect it under the Library of Congress, but I'd rather it be held by an international entity, as in, one not tied to the United States. Like maybe the United Nations?

Perhaps most pressing: why isn't Steve Guttenberg attached to Project Gutenberg? Is it the extra T? Can you get rid of that, Steven? Only you can fight Google.

Google Book Search and Why I Still Haven't Seen Pulp Fiction

Google hatched a plan back in 2002 to scan books so they could be searched and read online. Not just some books: all of them.

My immediate reaction is that this is an awesome project. Think about it - the world's biggest library. The world's library. Everything you could read, online and waiting. Isn't that what a library is? Access to books and information? Libraries and the internet have already started holding hands. Is this the perfect marriage?

I can go to a library and take out any book for free. I don't have to pay for my library card. The library bought the book, or someone donated it but they bought the book, whatever - the book was paid for in some manner. Once the book is in the library, anyone with a card can take it out. This is true in tiny communities all the way up to big cities; anyone can take this book out provided they don't take it so far as to strand it far away from its library home. I've never heard of an author having any problem with this, but then again, I haven't looked.

I've never heard of authors complaining about people lending their books to their friends. The friend doesn't buy a copy, so just like the library, the author doesn't get any cash from it. That's still okay. So where's the point where it's not okay to pass books around without paying for them? When the books travel between cities? Can they only go X number of miles?

Authors should be paid for their works. Authors are often a struggling lot to begin with; they put in work, they should be paid so they can do things like, say, eat. Or sleep somewhere warm and dry. Maybe even get a new shirt every once in a while, that kind of thing. We all agree on that. We all agree that libraries are good things, too, so at what point does it become wrong to distribute those books for free?

Musicians have had this problem ever since someone came up with file sharing. I always hear differing reports: either the music industry is crashing because of people downloading music, or it's actually pretty much doing the same. I like to think it's doing about the same, but I don't have the facts on that one and I'm not sure I'd trust anyone who said they did. I know I was very pleased when iTunes started selling single tracks for ninety-nine cents. I could preview it for thirty seconds, which was often enough even if it wasn't perfect, and it was still better than buying a CD for one track I knew I liked and thirteen others I had no idea about. It's convenient, and I buy a lot more music than I used to because of it. iTunes can be dangerous; ninety-nine cents adds up quickly.

I don't have to buy music. I have the ability to go find a torrent site, look up what I want, and just take it for free. It's illegal, but I can do it. I have a responsibility not to do that, a responsibility to pay for things I take. This paying thing makes it possible for the people who make the music to eat, sleep in warm places, and sometimes get a new shirt. That's how it should be.

I guess what puzzles me is where the line is for books. I don't agree with authors being denied money for their work. I don't like that there are some books I can never read. I don't even like it when I try to rent a movie at the store and they don't have it. If it's not new, it's just not there, and that bugs me. Some of us haven't seen Pulp Fiction yet. I would hate for it to become difficult to read a book just because it wasn't new. More difficult, anyway. Some of those suckers are out of print and I'd have to scour second hand book stores in cities far larger than the one I live in. So Google books would be good, right? Yes. And no. Maybe. I'm not the only one having a hard time deciding.