Copyright Resources on Port 80: Shoreline: issues

According to the Berliner Zeitung, the German government wants to levy as much as a 30 percent tax on almost all computer and telecommunications equipment as well as Internet applications. The tax would, if passed, go to pay artists including writers, filmmakers and musicians whose materials are frequently copied and distributed using the Internet and computer equipment. A fee of 38 to 306 euros ($34 to $275) already applies to German photocopiers, fax machines and scanners. If the Bundestag, Germany's lower house of parliament, passes such a law, it could lead to an exodus of computer firms from Germany, according to analysts.

Major record labels have launched an aggressive new guerrilla assault on the underground music networks, flooding online swapping services with bogus copies of popular songs.

Copyright's Next Chapter
Proposed copyright law raises controversy
Latest legislation tries to control the technology itself
by Benny Evangelista
SF Gate, April 8, 2002

Nearly a century ago, the music industry argued that its future was threatened by a new method of creating and distributing multiple copies of a performed song.

The new technology? The player piano roll.

Two decades ago, the movie industry fought against an innovative device that it claimed was as dangerous as the Boston Strangler: Sony's Betamax videocassette recorder.

Throughout history, new technologies -- from the Gutenberg printing press to Napster -- have posed a threat to the owners and creators of music, movies, books and other artistic works. Those publishers, writers, artists and other owners of copyrighted work have always responded with lawsuits and calls for stronger laws.

Stanford professor and author Lawrence Lessig plans a legal insurrection: Creative Commons

A joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, and University of San Francisco law school clinics.

Do you know your online rights? Have you received a letter asking you to remove information from a Web site or stop engaging in an activity? Are you concerned about liability for information that someone else posted to your online forum? If so, this site is for you.

These pages will help you understand the protections intellectual property laws and the First Amendment give to your online activities. We are excited about the new opportunities the Internet offers individuals to express their views, parody politicians, celebrate their favorite movie stars, or criticize businesses. But we've noticed that not everyone feels the same. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some individuals and corporations are using intellectual property and other laws to silence online users. Certainly intellectual property rights should be respected -- and we hope this site will aid you in doing so -- but they shouldn't be misused to impede legitimate activity.

Living with a three-year-old offers an odd perspective on the world. Whenever Tristan and other children his age play in each other's vicinity, an important parental task is to break up squabbles over who's playing with which toy for any given 30 seconds. "You need to share your trains with Peter," we'll say, and we'll hammer that lesson home 15 or 20 times in an afternoon.

Good thing we don't have to explain the current hullabaloo surrounding intellectual property to him. "Why don't the record companies want to let people share music?" he might ask. "Because they don't want to, and they have contracts that say they can do whatever they want with it," we'd reply. "But if I don't want to share toys with Peter, you tell me to put them up in your bedroom before he comes over. Why can't they put their music away where no one can get it?" Here's where we start to beat around the bush. "Well, because they want everyone to buy their music instead of sharing it." The three-year-old mind pounces. "So if Peter wants to play with my trains, I can make him give me a candy bar?" "No," we retort, falling back on parental say-so, "that's not nice, you just have to share."

A panel of recording-company executives at the conference depicted a beleaguered business in which a major-label album needs to sell at least half a million copies to break even and only 10 percent of albums ever recoup their investment. Marketing and promotion costs are high: good placement in retail stores can cost up to $250,000, and promoting a single Top 10 hit to radio stations can cost millions.

Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, spoke to the meeting on Tuesday morning. "Technology is forcing the record labels and the artists and the writers and the composers to come together," he said. "The Internet says to the industry that you folks are yesterday's news, you're following outdated models, your business strategies don't work anymore, and your profit motive is showing rather vulgarly."

Last year was a time of disarray and repositioning in the music business. "We have to rethink our business, and it may not be the record business anymore," said Miles Copeland, who owns Ark 21 Records.

Grass- roots entrepreneurs like Ian MacKaye, the leader of the band Fugazi and the owner of Dischord Records, said that through simple hard work and without written contracts for the bands on his label, he had been making a good living in the music business and even providing health care to his employees. Derek Sivers of CD Baby, a company that sells independent CD's from about 14,000 groups, said he had recently passed $1 million in payments to musicians.

Eben Moglen, a professor of law at Columbia University and the general counsel of the Free Software Foundation, ... urged the conference to think back to "music before Edison," before it became a commodity in the form of recordings. "Everything that can be shared will be shared," he said. "But people make music because they love it, and they'll pay for it because they love it."

a not-for-profit collaboration between members of the music, technology, public policy and intellectual property law communities. The FMC seeks to educate the media, policymakers, and the public about music / technology issues, while also bringing together diverse voices in an effort to come up with creative solutions .... The FMC also aims to identify and promote innovative business models that will help musicians and citizens to benefit from new technologies.

Copyright is a protection that covers published and unpublished works of literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, pictorial and certain other intellectual creations, provided such works are fixed in a tangible medium.

Gives answers to common questions, includes the proper format for a copyright on the Web. By Brad Templeton.

Note that this is an essay about copyright myths. It assumes you know at least what copyright is -- basically the legal exclusive right of the author of a creative work to control the copying of that work. If you
didn't know that, check out my own brief introduction to copyright for more information.

All the plaintiffs and the courts have done is to remove any form of "adult supervision" and any reasonable business model from the sharing of music and video files. I submit that's not good news for those of us who believe in the enforcement of copyright law. I submit that's bad news.

By driving millions of people underground and out of the marketplace, industry and the courts have created untold grief for themselves. Jed Rakoff has made his decision. Now let him enforce it.

Provides real world, practical and relevant copyright information of interest to anyone on the Net. From Benedict O'Mahoney, a lawyer who's an intellectual property rights expert.

Implications of Open Copyrights

I want to look at some of the implications of standardized, accessible information. We can't see deeply enough into business organizations, but we can see what's going on in society at large -- from a higher altitude, so to speak.

The presentations this evening are designed to give a brief glimpse at a few symptoms of the kinds of large-scale changes we're going to see in the next decades.

For example, look at what MIT is doing with OpenCourseWare. The implications are enormous for how academia has done business, for textbook publishers, and for poor people, especially in third-world countries.

Will business organizations be able to resist this pressure? Some sure are trying -- or at least keeping their eyes closed and hoping.

I see and hear a roaring freight train with a bright light trying to break through the fog onto the tracks where we're standing. We can get on board, get out of the way, or get run over.

Software is just the beginning … open source is doing for mass innovation what the assembly line did for mass production. Get ready for the era when collaboration replaces the corporation.

The simplest online database that could possibly work.

Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. Wiki supports hyperlinks and has a simple text syntax for creating new pages and crosslinks between internal pages on the fly.

Wiki is unusual among group communication mechanisms in that it allows the organization of contributions to be edited in addition to the content itself.

Like many simple concepts, "open editing" has some profound and subtle effects on Wiki usage. Allowing everyday users to create and edit any page in a Web site is exciting in that it encourages democratic use of the Web and promotes content composition by nontechnical users.

Wikipedia is a multilingual project to create a complete and accurate free content encyclopedia. We started in January 2001 and are currently working on 164877 articles in the English version. Visit the help page and experiment in the sandbox to learn how you can edit any article right now.

a flexible, powerful, and easy to use Web-based collaboration platform. Use TWiki to run a project development space, a document management system, a knowledge base, or any other groupware tool, on an intranet or on the internet. Web content can be created collaboratively by using just a browser. Developers can create new web applications based on a Plugin API.

an academic, non-profit initiative engaged in supporting distributed collaboration towards design challenges facing underserved communities and the environment. ThinkCycle seeks to create a culture of open source design innovation, with ongoing collaboration among individuals, communities and organizations around the world.

a record label using an open source, copyleft model, an experiment in practical gift economics, a laboratory for new ways of releasing music.

to implement and deploy the p2p components of soundCommons, an investigation of the concept of "creative commons" utilizing peer to peer networks as catalysts for collaboration and experimentation.

a non-profit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource.

The internet and electronic publishing enable the creation of public libraries of science containing the full text and data of any published research article, available free of charge to anyone, anywhere in the world.

to develop openly copyrighted (copylefted) textbooks using the free software development model. The books, developed collaboratively, would be freely available to download, modify, print and distribute.

Not only are textbooks unavailable to a great number of students in the US and abroad simply due to cost, few textbooks are universally suitable for courses in any given subject and many are simply sub-standard. The Open Textbook Project aims to address these issues by using a collaborative development model which has proven its effectiveness in the world of free software.

Those who would control the production and distribution of commodities typically seek not so much to harness network externalities, but rather, economies of scope. This economic phenomenon leverages consumer demand not by creating network critical mass in order to reap profits from exponential network growth, but rather by reusing the underlying commodity in many different ways. The rather obvious implication of this observation is that resources that can be used in many different ways are likely to attract more investment, and to penetrate society more fully, than resources that are very special-purpose. This, of course, will impact the choice of standards; an item that is low-level, simple, and easily integrated with other items is more likely to be useful as a building block than a special-purpose, complex, and highly proprietary item. ...

Demand for simple, standardized formats will overcome the advantages that once clearly favored Microsoft technology. Historically, the appearance of multiple sources for a commodity, multiple methods of production, and multiple markets, almost completely eliminates the power of the original producing culture, whether that culture is spice gatherers in the West Indies or global corporations. ...

Of course, it remains to be seen how governments and legal systems will deal with this transfer of value. Meanwhile, proprietary producers who attempt to defend their clone-prone products at all cost risk catastrophic losses. New ventures, structured around the assumption of a low-margin commodity network, can spread cloned standards across new markets without restraint, very cheaply. Coffee, tea, chocolate, sugar, petroleum, and tobacco, just like digital media, web documents, and databases, all incorporated innovative uses of their underlying resource into explosive growth while leaving commercial casualties in their wake.


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modified: February 5, 2002 by Douglas Anderson http://RicciStreet.net/port80/shoreline/copyrightresources.htm

Copyright Resources

hardware tax

Implications of Open Copyrights