The United States has scolded North Korea for staging some Disney shows without securing permission.
North Koreans are stunted and blind from malnutrition. North Korea has hundreds of thousands of people in death camps, including the parents and children of those who violated some bullshit law. North Korea makes repressive police states look good. And the US is scolding North Korea for violating copyright? OMFG.
I so want Cory Doctorow to write a book about how World War III was caused by North Korea’s violating of The Disney corporation’s “intellectual property rights.”
BTW, What would be a good title for this? Mouse Troopers? Kim Jong Mouse? The Pirates of North Korea?
Aaron Shaw has a very interesting post on what sure looks like contradictory instructions from the White House about whether we’re free to remix photos that have been released under a maximally permissive U.S. Government license. Aaron checked in with a Berkman mailing list where two theories are floated: It’s due to a PR reflex, or it’s an attempt to impose a contractual limitation on the work. There have been lots of other attempts to impose such limitations on reuse, so that “august” works don’t end up being repurposed by hate groups and pornographers; I don’t know if such limitations have any legal bite.
Dan Jones places himself clearly on the side of remixing. Here’s the White House original:
Michael Geist (@mgeist), a Canadian hero, is giving at talk at Mesh.
NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people.
When SOPA was introduced, it seemed likely to pass. Bipartistan love fest. But then the Internet fought back, from the Free Bieber campaign to online petitions. The number one source of info about SOPA was not the NYT or the Washington Post but a TechDirt blog post. (As an aside, someone launched a take down notice of this blog post, so it didn’t even appear in he Google search engine for a month.) The Reddit community was very active. E.g., when GoDaddy was listed as a supporter of SOPA, Reddit started a campaign to transfer domains from there. GoDaddy changed its mind. The big moment was when Wikipedia blacked out its English-language home page. That page was accessed 162M times that day — a striking ability to raise awareness. Other sites blacked out as well. The effect was dramatic: Within a day Congressional support swung.
For months people have been trying to figure out the “SOPA Story.” How did the number one legislative effort from the number one lobby go down in flames?
In Canada we can go back to Sam Bulte. The rise of groups lobbying for rights. The rise of social networks. The use of social media by rights-favoring politicians. So, in a sense, SOPA is nothing new here in Canada.
Blackouts aren’t new either: 1996 “computer decency act” protest. NewZealand’s protest. Italian-language Wikipedia blacked out last year.
So, in some ways the SOPA Story was nothing new. What’s new is what’s happening after SOPA…the enabling coming to people who think they now can truly affect what happens online. E.g., ACTA protests in Europe. Polish MPs donning Guy Fawkes masks. The dominoes have started to fall against ACTA. Now Neelie Kroes has said that ACTA is all but dead.
Likewise, the Research Works Act tried to scale back access to publicly-funded research. The Net fought back, withdrawing support from Elsevier, the key lobbyist for the RWA. Elsevier has withdrawn support for RWA and there is a petition now to go the other way. [SIGN THE PETITION]
In Canada, Proecting Children from Internet Predators Act — a 100-age bill that contains the word “children” only in its title. The Internet fought back. E.g., TellVic. It has been withdrawn, although temporarily.
The Net is spreading word. E.g., Kony 2012 spread around the world. There’s debate about whether it has had any effect, but the UN from people on the ground is that it has made a difference. Likewise, Trayvon Martin’s story was told through social media. Or, now, the Quebec student initiatives that started with just a few people but has grown because of social media.
LEssons: Don’t underestimate the power of social media to bring prople together to have a voice on issues. Second, SOPA happened only 18 months. We’re seeing a dramatic shift. The full consequences have not yet played out.
The third lesson is pessimistic. If this is the year that the Internet fought back, the battle may have been won but the fight continues. E.g., CETA, Trans Pacific Partnership (copyright tyranny), etc. There are reasons for optimism, but we have a long struggle ahead.
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Q: How long are we going to have to keep fighting our governments? When do we stop having to argue that social interests take priority over business interests?
A: E.g., this week public pressure worked on an act that had been given to the telcos for prior consultation. E.g., look at how the copyright bill has changed: changes to fair dealing, cap on statutory damages, consumer exceptions, etc. None of that was there originally. More politicians get it. But the content industries are powerful. The Internet is becoming an increasingly powerful voice.
Q: ICANN works on a multistakeholder model and has a limited mandate about setting policy. Some want to relegate that authority to the UN that runs it as a think tank. Which way is better?
A: The ITU has been pushing for governance space for then years. At ICANN some stakeholders count more than others. If the UN does it, repressive countries get the keys to the Net. I don’t see the ITU play happening.
Q: With SOPA there was a lot of groupthink. It lacked subtlety and nuance.
A: We’ve had 30 years of lobbying by rights holders with a total lack of nuance: “It’s theft. It’s piracy. Shut it down.” Not reflective of what’s actually happening. So, yes, some are slackivists just clicking on a Like button. But they are more informed than the general populace on these issues. I did a talk for 8th grade students, and almost all of them had heard of SOPA and Kony, and most knew more about Kony than they knew before March of this year.
Neelie Kroes is becoming one of the open Internet’s most influential supporters.
Kroes is Vice President of the European Commission and is responsible for its “digital agenda.” At the Forum d’Avignon I was at (see here and here) she was just about the only person in a positon of power — economic or regulatory — to suggest that the Internet is actually a good thing for culture, and that we need new ways to think about copyright and distribution. Yesterday she gave a speech at the World Wide Web Conference in Lyon in which she called for new thinking to support an open Internet. Most importantly, she explicitly recognized that openness is indeed the property from which the rest of the Net’s value springs.
That a leader of the EC responsible for the “digital agenda” understands this shouldn’t be news. But it is. She even cites Yochai Benkler. Go Neelie!
Her talk begins by nailing its main point:
The best thing about the Internet is that it is open. Indeed it’s built on the idea that every device can talk to every other, using a common, open language. That’s what explains its seemingly endless growth.
Exactly right! Thank you, I’ll be here all week, drive safe, and God bless.
She goes on to explain the many benefits openness brings: “…choice and competition; innovation and opportunity; freedom and democratic accountability.” “Look at what we could do if we opened up our public sectors and put their data online.” She touts open standards. She points to political benefits: “And just look at what openness can do for freedom of speech. The Internet gives a voice to the powerless, and holds the powerful to account.”
Then she turns to the factors that impede openness:
Sometimes the problem is ancient, pre-digital rules that we need to cut back or make more flexible. Other times, openness actually flows from strengthening regulation.
She goes on to say that sometimes it’s about changing a “mindset,” not changing the rules. She says that we need an environment were different models are available and can compete. For example, some people want open discussions and some want moderated forums. We should have all types so people can choose. Likewise, we should have many different business models. People who want to be compensated monetarily for their deserve to be, although many are happy to give away what they’ve created. She says:
Look at the complicating licensing systems for copyrighted material here in Europe. These guarantee that Europeans miss out on great content, they discourage business innovation, and they fail to serve the creative people in whose name they were established.
Woohoo!
After nodding to the need for security and privacy, she gets down to the infrastructure level:
…open competition, brought by the EU, has delivered for Europe. It offers consumers better deals and new, tailored services; market players new opportunities; and potential investors legal certainty.
She states her firm commitment to net neutrality. She is fine with having many market choices, including for cheaper plans that provide limited bandwidth, or access designed for specialized preferences. But, she says, there must always be truly open, neutral access, and she points to the BEREC study due in May that should tell us whether in Europe truly open access is being offered to everyone as an option.
Great speech, especially from a person in her position.
So, let me tell you my one concern. Kroes’ idea of openness means that the Net ecosystem should support the option for closed systems for those who want them: It needs to support copyright and it needs to support offerings from access providers that limit access. In theory there’s nothing wrong with that. The problem comes when you try to engineer an open system to support closed options. So, even the most crazed copyright supporter (let’s just call him, oh I don’t know, “Sarkozy”) is happy to let people give away their own content if they should be nutty enough to want to do so. But to support the “equal and opposite” option of being able to sell content, Sarkozy wants to rejigger the entire system to prevent “piracy.” If you want to offer the closed option with sufficient rigor to prevent all violations, the system would need to become closed. Kroes is certainly not advocating that closure, but the piece I feel is missing from her talk is the recognition that the value of openness surpasses the value that would come from a system engineered to so scrupulously protect IP. We have to accept some degree of risk for IP in order to have the openness that brings us the values Kroes is so eloquent about.
Likewise, I have no problem with access providers offering plans with data caps or that throttle bandwidth (assuming they’re transparent about it); that does not violate my idea of net neutrality. But there are conceivable plans for “specialist user needs” (as Kroes calls them) that would be discriminatory: A plan that gives priority to the delivery of movies (for example) would give those movie bits priority over the non-movie bits that other users of the Net care about. Personally, I think the best protection for the open Internet is structural separation: access providers sell you access — including tiered services — but are not allowed to sell either content or services that discriminate among bits. I don’t know where Kroes stands on this, but again I would have preferred a clear statement about it.
But now I’m just being greedy. Neelie Kroes is an Internet champion at time when we desperately need one.
Musician and Berkman Fellow Erin McKeown has written a wonderful post expressing her ambivalence about copyright.
Her heart and her brain are on the side of copyreasonableness, and thus she reacts strongly against the insane copyright totalitarianism that has come to be taken as obvious, normal, and even righteous.
But then this happened: In 2003, she wrote and recorded Slung-Ho with some success.
In 2008, it was used in a commercial shown in the Czech Republic. Last year, a Czech singer issued this song. See it here because Sony, having its sense or irony removed in the operation that removed its heart and common sense, won’t let the video be embedded. Proof:
Let’s stipulate that it’s a rip-off: not a mash-up, not an homage, not an inspired-by. It’s a commercial rip-off intended to make money off the another’s creative work. And the song has done very well commercially.
Erin has mixed feelings, which she expresses honestly. That’s what makes her post so interesting.
And challenging.
I think our current copyright system is insanely inadequate for the new ecology, and that it has the opposite effect that its best-spirited defenders want it to have: the current copyright laws (and mindset) are impeding the greatest cultural flowering in our history, and if those copyright laws are taken to their proposed maximum, they will kill culture dead.
And yet. I write books that are copyrighted. I write them in part to make a living. If you published my book without my permission under your name, I’d be pissed off. If you then sold them at half my publisher’s price on Amazon, my publisher would sue you and I’d happily testify against you. And I wouldn’t feel like a hypocrite. Well, I would (just as Erin feels ambivalent), but I’d remind myself that in this case, that niggling fear of hypocrisy is evidence t hat I’ve fallen into the copyright totalitarians’ trap.
The trap uses the fact that the line between cultural sharing and ripping someone off is blurry. Was George Harrison really ripping off The Chiffon’s in My Sweet Lord? For me, that’s a really blurry line, but ultimately I was sorry that he lost the case, in part because the song was simpler, in part because it was so famous a reference that I thought it was a form of homage, and in part because when in doubt we should allow cultural re-mixing to avoid cultural chilling effects. But the fact that the line is blurry does not mean that all cases are blurry. And Erin’s case and my hypothetical case are to me clear instances where someone is stealing the rewards that should accrue to the creator. I don’t think Erin is being hypocritical in the least: supporting serious copyright reform does not require one to give up all copyright claims. We think otherwise because the copyright totalitarians have succeeded in making us think that the alternative to the current insanity is to have absolutely no protection for creators. But fuzzy lines are still lines. (Well, ok, maybe they’re actually areas, not lines. But that’s neither here nor there.)
If anything, Erin’s willingness to protect her works from an egregious ripoff should make her an even stronger voice in the movement to protect sharing from the current predatory copyright laws.
Here’s an amazing video from StooTV that shows Raiders of the Lost Ark paired with identical shots from 30 different adventure movies made between 1919 and 1973. Yup, that’s how culture works…at least if we let it.
Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda, has become a lonely voice trying to protect the Net’s most basic values. At a cultural ministers’ meeting held in Avignon last month, she had the temerity to suggest that the copyright system is not working to protect the rights of creators or to spread culture. Now she is suggesting that the Net can actually help the forces of freedom and democracy around the world. This new speech not only makes the case, it seems to have paid attention to the debate over previous claims that the Net is overall a positive political force, not merely a neutral technology, and not primarily a tool of oppression.
Neelie gave her full speech in Avignon in a closed door meeting, but she presented a version of it the next day at the Forum d’Avignon, which I was at and live-blogged. At the time, it struck me as certainly better than the copyright totalitarianism espoused by President Sarkozy, the values of which were mirrored by most of the participants in the Forum. But I thought Neelie was proposing nothing more interesting than adjusting copyright law so that more money went into the hands of more artists, rather than addressing the imbalance between the rights of creators and of the public. But I’ve been convinced by European friends, particularly Juan Carlos de Martin that I’m failing to hear her remarks in the right European context.
Trurl at Metafilter posts about Scarlatti’s piano sonatas, a composer I haven’t spent a lot of time with, probably because of some bad, cheapo LPs I bought randomly when I was in college. But Trurl’s got some recommendations and some links to YouTube performances. The comments to the post have more discussion, more links, discussion back and forth about Bach versus Scarlatti, questions about musical notation, and so forth.
So, I’ve spent far more time this morning learning about Scarlatti, poking around sites, listening to his music, than I had intended or even imagined. Indeed, I had intended to spend zero time doing any of those things. Scarlatti happened to me this morning. Thank you, Internet!
As we contemplate protecting the rights of artists and enriching publishers, we ought to be thinking first: Yes, but how do we let more of that happen?
So what did I learn at the Forum d’Avignon about the fate of the Internet in Europe?
It’s of course impossible to distill the entire conference, especially since much of the benefit was getting to meet some fascinating people. And, it’s impossible to feel confident about these lessons because the event consisted of 450 invited guests, so my sample was skewed, even though there was an attempt to achieve balance across cultures, beliefs, and genders. (Fully half of the attendees were women.) Nevertheless, …
Within this set of policy makers and large industry players, there is a conviction that the Internet is primarily a threat that has put all of culture and creativity at risk.
Why do they see it that way? Many of them are content publishers. To them, the Net looks like a competitive publishing medium that connects cultural content to consumers via search engines. Although the conference puts this concern in terms of the failure of the Net to connect consumers to worthy objects of culture, virtually all the public discussion was about the economic threat the current purveyors of mass culture feel. They believe that without the strictest enforcement of copyright, creators won’t be able to earn a living, and thus the Net will kill culture. The idea that the Net is actually the greatest engine of culture in history was expressed only three times, each time by Americans. [The next day: That last sentence is an overstatement. Americans expressed this idea the most directly and forcefully, it seems to me, but not solely.]
Authors rights were taken at the Forum as an economic imperative and as a moral imperative. There is no sense at all that those rights might be usefully balanced with the rights of “consumers” and makers. None. Zilch. Fair Use — granted, an American concept — was raised once in passing. (Victoria Espinel, Obama’s IP Czar, mentioned it, very positively.) The attendees were so convinced that authors’ rights are supreme that they left the conference convinced that there is consensus on the topic. Indeed, the conference ended with a summary of the ministerial summit on culture that was held in parallel with the first day of the conference: All the stakeholders agree on the supreme importance of fighting piracy. Of course, that ministerial meeting [Later: it was called the Cultural Summit, I have learned] included no users at all. So much for “all the stakeholders.” (I pointed this out to the person who convened the meeting (which I was not at, of course), and he said that the government representatives were there to represent users.)
Because of their view of the Net as a publishing medium, and because of the abundance of content on the Net, the dominant paradigm of the Forum views Google as the center of the Net. The participants thus wondered what sort of legislation is required to enforce “search neutrality” against Google. Now, there is no denying that Google is a center of the Net, and its algorithms have a great deal of effect on which pages are seen. But the participants at the Forum had what seemed to me to be a monomaniacal focus on Google, which makes sense if you’re thinking of the Net as a pile of content mediated by an index. They seemed to have no sense that there are living networks of people recommending and linking outside of Google’s search box. And for many of us, the transformative effect of the Net has been as a social place, not as an information medium.
Based on random interactions, it seems to me that at this meeting the small coalition that supported users’ rights as well as authors’ rights consisted of Americans, librarians, and students. Had there been more hackers here, I suspect they’d join our little band, but engineers, geeks and techies were woefully under-represented.
Overall, quite depressing, with the most profound anti-Internet sentiment coming from President Sarkozy in an 1.5 talk and discussion he favored us with.
Vive l’internet ouvert!
[All errors in French due to Google Translate.]
________
It is true that European Commissioner Neelie Kroes attacked the focus on copyright as misguided. Many in the media seem to have heard this as a call for copyright reform. (Here’s my live-blogging of her remarks.) I did not. I thought she was fully backing the rights of authors and strong copyright protection, but saying that we need to do more to create business models that create more money for creators. I did not hear Neelie suggesting copyright reform. I hope I’m wrong.
