Adina Levin's weblog. For conversation about books I've been reading, social software, and other stuff too.
I’m in Boston for a few days, for work and play.
Tomorrow, I’m on the Managing a Business Blog panel at the Jupiter Weblog Business Strategies conference.
Looking forward to hearing more good examples of things people are doing with social software in the real world.
And then going to the BostonBlogs dinner. And then going back to Austin.
This weekend, I’ve been staying with friends in Somerville, meeting their four-month old baby, who has a charming smile, squeaks like a mousie, and falls asleep to James Brown and Stevie Wonder.
Reading their their books (Emerson Among the Eccentrics).
Receiving visitors on the porch, in the 59 degrees damp chill, because our friends are deathly allergic to the resident cat. (Ah, Spring in New England).
In Jamaica Plain, getting a photo tour of a trip to Kyoto (elegant pictures of cherry blossoms, gardens, and temples; grisly tales of vengeance and treachery.)
For folks who don’t know, I lived in Somerville between 1987 and 1999.
In Somerville and Cambridge, the only public wireless I’ve been able to find is the T-Mobile service at Starbucks. If I’m missing some good public wireless, please let me know.
My hosts have WiFi, but there’s a problem with sending outgoing mail. So I can send webmail, or queue mail, and head over to Starbucks.
Austin seems extensively unwired by comparison.
(This is the entry I mean to post in Austinbloggers, not the earlier one)
The Rabbis of the Talmud were troubled by the evil and cruelty they saw in the world. So they tracked down the Evil Inclination, and locked it in a cage. And the world was peaceful for a while.
After a few months, people started to come to the Rabbis with complaints. Hens had stopped laying eggs. No children were being conceived. No new houses were built. No new fields were planted. So the Rabbis opened the cage, blinded the Evil Inclination in one eye, and let it free.
Caught up in the latest battle in the content wars, I went searching for context.
I read two books last weekend that explain the history from different angles.
* Copyrights and Copywrongs, by Siva Vaidhyanation, is an erudite intellectual history of the concept of copyright, and an eloquent critique of the damage done to culture by draconian content policies.
* Digital Copyright: Protecting Intellectual Property on the Internet, by Jessica Litman is a more prosaic account of the last decade’s legal battles, by a practicing copyright lawyer who was an eyewitness and participant. What Litman’s book lacks in elequence, it makes up in tactical observation and insight.
The history provides helpful perspective on this year’s battles.
* the relationship between the federal Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the state-level bills, nicknamed SDMCA, even though the state bills say nothing about content and copyright.
* the eerie historical parallels, and critical differences, between the events in DC in the 90s, and the state-level events this past year.
* the long-term history and long-term consequences of this year’s events
Why are the state bills nicknamed “SDMCA”
The history explains the relationship between the DMCA, a 1996 addition to Federal copyright law that bans circumvention of copy protection — and the so-called S-DMCA — the state level bills that give movie companies and ISPs vast power over their customers’ use of a network connection.
The right to copy movies, music, and books is governed at the federal level, because copyright is defined in the constitution. But access to content services is regulated at the state level.
In their effort to legislate perfect control over customers’ access to content, the MPAA needs to change legislation at the state level. Hence the SDMCA.
History Repeats Itself
There were eerie similarities between the national fight last decade and this year’s efforts.
Here’s where the stories diverged. Just like in the 90s, the telecom companies were “carved out” by an exemption from liability. When the American Electronics Association agreed to a carve-out exempting manufacturers and resellers from liability, it looked like the parallel was complete. Citizen groups would be the sole opposition, and go down to defeat.
This time, though, resellers and manufacturers saw beyond the liability carveout. They recognized that their market opportunity and ability to innovate were threatened by laws that let movie and cable companies micromanage customers’ use of technology — even if the manufactures and resellers were exempt from direct liability for their customers’ misdeeds.
The technology companies kept fighting the bill, and helped raise active opposition among tech-savvy legislators.
Long-term perspective
Copyright policy has been slowly swinging from a balance between publishers and public rights, toward publisher control, for a century.
The MPAA has been working on this issue for ten years, and has a long-term strategy to erode and abolish fair use and fair access.
It’s critically important for citizen groups to have a seat at the table. The Sierra Club and the National Rifle Association make their voices heard. Technologists and technology users should too. My guess is that we’re swing voters; prove that theory, aggregate our dollars and votes, and watch the power balance change.
Weinberger reports on a conference session about the invention of alphabetical order, developed a new type of reader: not a scholar who reads continuously but someone who looks things up.” The prevalence of search engines is rederning other kinds of indexes less important.
A while ago, I griped about visiting a home libary holding several stories of matching leatherbound books, arrayed to display the wealth and culture of the owner. The pages were still uncut. The books weren’t for reading.
In fact, early generations of printed books in the Renaissance (mid-1400s) were produced and purchased for this purpose. Agents purchased copies of these new luxury items, produced with custom illustration, and bound identically in expensive leather with precious metal and jewels, to display the wealth of their noble, ecclesiastical, or merchant clients.
A century later, books were produced in print runs of 1000 or more, serving a growing audience of readers and scholars. Letters served as a very slow search engine — readers wrote their colleagues, asking where they might find the latest edition edition of a new classical translation or new scholarly text.
from Worldly Goods by Lisa Jardine, a history of the Renaissance through material culture.
Chip and Adam are concerned that defining a set of fair use rights would actually serve to limit fair use. I agree that it would be a problem if fair use rights were defined with narrow specifics as in the DMCA, and think a “fair use bill of rights” should define fair use broadly, just as the Bill of Rights has broad definitions for freedoms of speech and assembly.
Based on experience working to oppose the SDMCA in Texas, I have a different concern from Chip and Adam.
Over the last decade, the content industries have succeeded in stereotyping most personal and creative uses of content as potential theft. We have a big image problem, in the minds of the public and in the minds of legislators, who now think of end-users as thieves.
I don’t think it’s enough to describe user rights in a technical fashion, whether as Adam suggests, as all uses other than redistributing a work, in whole or large part for profit, or whether, Jessica Litman suggests, as a balance shifting back from “thick” copyright protection to “thin” copyright protection.
We need to create a positive, affirmative image of all of the legal, personal, intellectual, creative, and innovative ways that people use content. We need to create an environment where infringing fair use is viewed with the same horror in American culture as infringing free speech.
Only by having a strong, positive image, and broad standard for fair use, can we counter the stereotype that personal and social cultural creativity constitutes stealing.
Ross Mayfield praises the Digital Consumer bill of rights, asserting the rights that consumers have had until recently. These include:
This is a step in the right direction, and would be improved by going a step further.
We need a strong expression of “Fair Use”, including:
To my understanding (I’m not a lawyer), only the last item in the list is codified in the 1976 Copyright Act. Other cultural rights, which were a part of the balance in copyright law intended by the framers of the constitution, and were developed in US legal tradition, are being rapidly eroded by increasingly harsh laws that restrict the use and creation of culture.
Just as the Bill of Rights enshrined a core set of rights for citizens, the “Fair Use Bill of Rights” would enshrine a set of rights for consumers and creators of culture.
Please add items missing in the list, and correct errors of fact.
Another insightful quote from Siva V:
Copyright was designed to regulate only copying. It was not supposed to regulate one’s rights to read or share.
But now that the distinctions among accessing, using, and copying have collapsed copyright policy makers have found themselves faced with what seems to be a difficult choice: either relinquish some control over copying, or expand copyright to regulate access and use, despite the chilling effect it might have on creativity, community, and democracy.
The Digital Millennium Copyright act is a federal law enabling copyright holders to enforce copy-protection.
The so-called S-DMCA is a state-level initiative that extends content-owner’s control beyond copying, to control over access.