[Dixielandjazz] Copyrights - Pirates - Audio or Visual - Some history

[Steve barbone]

Following article is LONG, not about CD burning - Except that it discusses
the parallel issue of stealing intellectual property (Visual rather than
audio). It has been a PROBLEM since 1700 or so. :-) VBG

Only the technology has changed. Great read from a "historical" point of
view.

Cheers,
Steve


If Books Are on Google, Who Gains and Who Loses?

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN - November 14, 2005 - NY Times

In 1709, Daniel Defoe compared them to "House-breakers," "High-way Robbers,"
and "Pick-Pockets," not sounding that different from the way software
makers, movie producers and writers sound today when they speak about
copyright pirates. 

Why, Defoe asked - at a time when authors had no rights to their own work -
should there be laws against one class of villain, and not against those who
steal another kind of property created "after infinite Labour, Study, and
Expence"?

Why, his colleague at arms Joseph Addison asked, should "Mechanick Artizans"
be able to reap the "Fruit of their Invention and Ingenuity without
Invasion" while a writer who has "studied the Wonders of the Creation" has
"no Property in what he is willing to produce"?

Such were some of the earlier clamors for authors' rights. The latest can be
heard in debates about Google Print, an enterprise in which Google is
scanning books from five major research libraries, along with submissions of
publishers, to create a searchable database of the written word. In
September, the Author's Guild, a trade group representing writers, sued
Google, claiming "massive copyright infringement." The Association of
American Publishers has also sued Google over its project, which just
resumed after being suspended for a few months while the company re-examined
the issues. Last month, a competitive group, the Open Content Alliance
(which includes Yahoo and Microsoft), announced plans to scan collections of
other libraries, while trying to accommodate the objections made to Google.

The controversy promises to erupt on Thursday at 7 p.m. at the New York
Public Library's Celeste Bartos Forum, when the debate will be joined by
members of the guild, the publishers' association and Google. Also in the
fray will be Lawrence Lessig of Stanford Law School, Chris Anderson, editor
in chief of Wired Magazine, and Paul LeClerc and David Ferriero from the
library (which is participating in Google Print).

But as I argued in a version of this column in The International Herald
Tribune last month, contention is commonplace during eras of technological
change. When Defoe and Addison were demanding consideration in London 300
years ago, the right to "copy" or publish any book was held not by the
author but by members of London's Stationers' Company - booksellers and
printers - who held a monopoly on that right in perpetuity. That seemed
reasonable during the century after the introduction of the printing press
and the considerable expenses needed to print, distribute and sell a book to
the small literate public.

But by the beginning of the 18th century, printing was becoming less
expensive, international and provincial publishers were offering
competition, literacy increased and authors grew in public stature. So over
the next half-century, British laws limited the control of the Stationers
and expanded the rights of authors, while also putting time limits on all
forms of control, creating what became the public domain.

Then came another wave of technological change: the industrial revolution.
And similar controversies erupted. Inventions were once relatively immune
from copying because of the craft they required; execution could seem more
difficult than coming up with the idea. Once manufacturing was mechanized,
though, the idea itself could become vulnerable, leading to both increased
governmental control and increased industrial espionage. Britain prohibited
the export of machinery while the fledgling United States welcomed insiders
with information from there.

Now, just as increasing trade and decreasing costs led to the breakdown of
the Stationers' monopoly in the 18th century and to an increase in
industrial espionage in the 19th, the Internet's near elimination of costs
for the transmission and sifting of digital media has led to another wave of
copiers and protectors, along with accusations of theft and heated debates
over file-sharing, copy-protection and licensing.

But during the last decade the debates have had a different character. The
self-described "progressive" side has challenged copyright enforcement and
even argued for its radical diminishment. This attempt to minimize existing
controls, though, is imagined not as a triumph for authors (as was initially
the case in the 18th century) or as a triumph for profiteers or national
ambitions (as in the industrial espionage of the 19th), but as a form of
liberation.

In many such arguments, lines are starkly drawn and echo older ideological
battles: idealism confronts materialism, socialism confronts capitalism,
communal values confront individualism. Challengers of copyright and patent
legislation often portray themselves as liberators, bravely opposing a
greedy global corporate culture that tries to claim each bit of intellectual
property for itself the way imperialist explorers tried to plant the
motherland's flag on every unclaimed piece of land. Meanwhile, advocates of
tighter control over copyright see things very differently, viewing this
attack as an assault on the rights of inventors and writers, undermining
those who invest their time and labor to answer human needs and desires.

In part, the ideology of liberation evolved out of libertarian and utopian
hacker culture (which also gave birth to recreational piracy). An
international counterculture developed around the new technologies sometimes
spurred by figures who had also been active in the political counterculture
of the 1960's and 70's. That spirit led to advances - like the development
of "open source" software in which programmers have contributed their
energies to shared projects. It has also led to well-traveled mantras like
"Information Wants to Be Free" and to arguments more focused on restricting
those who attempt to control than those who attempt to copy.

But the categories are all wrong. Organized information - information given
shape and meaning - is never really free. And the virtues of "open source"
software are not simply that it avoids corporate ownership. The operating
system Linux, for example, has succeeded not just because varied individuals
are freely contributing to its evolution, but also because companies are
supporting it, and panels of overseers and a strict organizational procedure
govern its specialized licenses.

Technology also keeps unsettling the categories. Some new forms of control
will be needed to prevent unrestricted copying, but technological innovation
will undermine attempts to apply too much control. Some flexibility is
needed to prevent the stifling of communication and commerce, but
technological innovation will foil those who believe it should not exist at
all. This doesn't make things easy; it makes them unpredictable.

This is clear in the Google debate. Google, which is engaged in a project
that was sci-fi fantasy two decades ago, is essentially being accused of
piracy, creating copies of protected works without prior permission. But
these are new kinds of copies, with very different uses; only books out of
copyright will be fully available online.

The law has already judged search engines to be engaged in "fair use" when
they index copyrighted material found on the Internet; now the issue is
whether indexing copyrighted material not found on the Internet is also
"fair use." Google has specified the extremely limited form such use will
take for copyrighted library material: enough to allow a search that will
provide information about the book (including places to buy or borrow it)
and three citations restricted to small passages that should suffice to
illustrate the book's importance or relevance to the researcher. More
extensive reading would require purchasing the book from booksellers or
publishers (though other payment models will be necessary, such as those
being experimented with by Amazon). Individual books can be removed from the
index, just as Web sites can.

This model will change over time. So will the notion of "copy." So will the
practices of libraries, publishers and booksellers. It may not be too much
to hope that so will the ideologies of copyright debate.