2008 September :: Copyright Reform

U.S. Senate Bill 3325: Exactly The Wrong Law

Permalink: http://questioncopyright.org/S.3325
Posted by kfogel | Posted in: Syndicated Articles | Comments(0) September 2008

Patrick Leahy (D-VT) was one of the Senators who sponsored S. 3325, despite his generally good track record on electronic freedom issues. See below for information on how you can help Sen. Leahy understand why he shouldn't support this bill.

QuestionCopyright.org doesn't normally focus on immediate legislative goals. Current copyright law is pretty bad, but our mission is to change the way people think about copyright, in the belief that legislative change will follow.

But every now and then, a proposed new law is so off-the-charts wrongheaded that it needs to be immediately shut down. U.S. Senate Bill S. 3325 is one such. Public Knowledge has a great summary of what's wrong with it:

Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee gave the green light to S. 3325, the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Act of 2008. We need you to show them the red light, NOW! This intellectual property enforcement bill lets the DOJ enforce civil copyright claims and lets the government do the MPAA and RIAA's intellectual property rights enforcement work for them — at tax payers' expense.

The bill also needlessly bundles trademark protections with copyright restrictions, thus further confusing these two unrelated things in the mind of the public (and, no doubt, in the minds of many Senators). Identity protection is a fine goal, but it has nothing to do with copyright. Search the bill for the phrase "counterfeit and pirated goods" and you'll see immediately how these different concepts are repeatedly yoked together, with the effect that mere unauthorized copying is tainted with the stigma of counterfeiting. For example:

For purposes of this title, the term `intellectual property enforcement' means matters relating to the enforcement of laws protecting copyrights, patents, trademarks, other forms of intellectual property, and trade secrets, both in the United States and abroad, including in particular matters relating to combating counterfeit and pirated goods.

See the full text of the two proposed versions of the bill for details.

Public Knowledge has set up a very convenient web page from which you can call or fax your Senators (if you're a U.S. citizen) and tell why they should oppose S. 3325. Please, if you have ten minutes to spare today...

GO THERE NOW AND DO IT.

Thank you.

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EFF, Public Knowledge Sue Over Secret IP Pact

Permalink: http://www.CopyrightReform.us/archives/111
Posted by Bryan Andrews | Posted in: External Articles | Comments(0) September 2008

"The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge have filed a lawsuit against the Office of the US Trade Representative in an attempt to get the office to turn over information about a secret Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement treaty being negotiated to step up cross-border enforcement of copyright and piracy laws. ACTA could include an agreement for the US, Canada, the European Commission and other nations to enforce each others’ IP laws, with residents of each country subject to criminal charges when violating the IP laws of another country, according to a supposed ACTA discussion paper [PDF] posted on Wikileaks.org in May."

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The Future of Copyright: Ruining Privacy and Civil Liberties

Permalink: http://www.CopyrightReform.us/archives/109
Posted by Bryan Andrews | Posted in: Articles | Comments(0) September 2008

Believers in copyright keep dreaming about building a digital simulation of a 20th-century copyright economy, based on scarcity and with distinct limits between broadcasting and unit sales. This vision of copyright utopia is triggering an escalation of technology regulations running out of control and ruining civil liberties.

How relevant is it to declare oneself to be “for” or “against” copyright? Neither the stabilization nor the abolition of the copyright system seems within reach. All we see is a seemingly endless assembly line of new extensions to the law being proposed and enacted. The most recent is the proposed “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” (ACTA) [1], to be tabled at next month’s G8 meeting in Tokyo, including a clause known as the “Pirate Bay killer” that would force countries to criminalize services that may facilitate copyright infringement, even if not for profit. This is just one example of how copyright law is mutating into something qualitatively different than what it has been in previous centuries.

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Can laws be copyrighted? Carl Malamud and public.resource.org say no…

Permalink: http://questioncopyright.org/california_law_copyright_challenged
Posted by kfogel | Posted in: Syndicated Articles | Comments(0) September 2008

Thanks to James Jacobs for sending in a link to the article "He's giving you access, one document at a time" by Nathan Halverson at pressdemocrat.com. It's about how Carl Malamud and public.resource.org are defying the state of California by — get this — putting California's laws online for public access.

You wouldn't think that would be a particularly controversial thing to do. In fact, you might even expect California to have done so already, and in standard, parseable electronic formats too (as per the Open Government Data Principles). But instead, California enforces copyright over the texts of its laws. Quoting from the article:

California asserts copyright protections for its laws, contending it ensures the public gets accurate, timely information while generating revenue for the state.

"We exercise our copyright to benefit the people of California," said Linda Brown, deputy director of the Office of Administrative Law, which manages the state's laws. "We are obtaining compensation for the people of California."

It's a great example of how copyright restrictions inevitably spread to new areas, without regard to the public purpose. The logic goes something like this: the law is a text; a text has value according to its usefulness; if a text has value, someone can make money by restricting who shares it and then charging money for a lease on that monopoly; the state always needs revenue; ergo, the state should restrict the spread of its own laws, in order to raise funds! The reasoning is bizarre, almost breath-taking in its audacity. And it leads civil servants to claim, with straight faces, that the state has an interest in denying people access to the text of the law.

What's most interesting is how clearly this case reveals the old relationship between printers' monopolies and copyright law. California justifies their copyright restriction in exactly the same way the English Parliament justified the first copyright law: that the public good is best served by profitable distribution, and that means supporting printers by giving them a monopoly.

Of course, that argument made a lot more sense in 1709, when there wasn't an Internet around to allow zero-cost distribution of public goods :-).