Revision of Project Proposals from Fri, 2007-12-28 12:20
Below are descriptions of several projects we'd like to do. We add them here as we think of them; which ones we carry out depends on time and resources. If there are any you'd like to help with, please let us know.
-
The Ghost Works Survey
In the article "Seen Any Ghost Works Lately?", a ghost work is defined as a creative work that never gets made in the first place, or is made but not released, because copyright concerns prevent it either from being started or from being distributed.
For example: fan fiction in which writers try to create stories set in a pre-existing fictional universe (e.g., the Star Trek universe, or the world of J.R.R. Tolkien), but are shut down by whatever entity controls the copyright on the original works. Fan fiction is simultaneously homage and an original act of creation (much as Tolkien's own work draws on the Norse myths he studied as a philologist), but is often suppressed due to copyright concerns. Another example is the critically-acclaimed film "Killer of Sheep", which lay in enforced dormancy for thirty years due to stalled rights negotations over the music in its soundtrack.
How often do ghost works happen? What fields do they tend to occur in? What artists are affected?
We don't know, because there has been no systematic attempt to survey the phenomenon, and ghost works rarely come to the public's attention, since, by definition, they do not circulate.
The Ghost Works Survey would attempt to remedy this, by gathering data from artists in music, prose, poetry, and the visual arts. The purpose is not to catalogue every known ghost work — there are likely far too many, as almost every artist we've talked to so far has a story of a work they had to alter or lay aside due to copyright concerns. Rather, the purpose is qualitative: to discern large-scale patterns among ghost works, so we can understand (and publicize) the artistic effects of copyright's suppressive side.
-
The Media Confusion Project
When talking to journalists or in public forums, copyright industry representatives frequently confuse the issue of plagiarism with that of illegal filesharing. Whether they do this deliberately is hard to say, but once you're looking for it, you can see it happening all the time (for example, here, here, and here).
Unfortunately, they don't get called on it very often. This may be partly because copyright rhetoric has been conflating misattribution with unauthorized copying for so many years that, for a lot of people, there is simply no distinction anymore (there is some anecdotal evidence suggesting this result).
The Media Confusion Project would be an organized effort by many volunteers, to find and catalog as many instances of this confusion as possible, on the Internet, in print media, and in broadcast media. While collecting the examples, the same team would contact as many of these forums as possible and point out that sharing is not the same as plagiarism, with the specific goal of making journalists aware of the distinction. This would serve two purposes: first, it encourages them not to make the same mistake when writing on the topic in the future; and second, it makes them question the credibility of sources who try to obscure the distinction. The resulting catalog of instances will also provide a useful resource for reformers who need concrete examples (such as Rick Falkvinge's revealing story of being at a copyright insider's conference and hearing a speaker openly recommend that the industry associate unrestricted filesharing with the flow of child pornography, in order to convince legislators that Internet service must be filtered.)
You might also call this The "Who Got The Memo?" Project. So many of the industry's defenses of the status quo show obvious similarities between nominally unrelated entities that it's likely there is some back-channel coordination going on. There's nothing inherently nefarious about that, of course, but we could do a lot of good by discovering those talking points and showing them for what they are. It's not just the confusion of copyright violation with plagiarism; there are also the inflated "loss" statistics given for unauthorized copying, the encouragement of mandatory anti-pornography filtering as described above, and the conflation of filesharing with so-called "cyberterrorism" and national security issues. (And part of this project could be the gathering of the actual memos, if we can find anonymous sources willing to forward them...)
-
Copyright As Censorship
Copyright is frequently used as a tool of censorship, or at least a tool for threatening censorship, which is in effect the same thing (see this article, for example). While the victims of the censorship are often not sympathetic, many potential allies understand the principle of freedom of speech and will be able to see copyright in this new way, if it's presented succinctly and convincingly enough. The project would involve gathering many examples of such censorship (with the help of volunteers), and presenting them in video form, with online textual resources to back up those who want to examine any particular incident in depth.
-
Economic Survey of Artists
The copyright industry and its allies frequently claim that without copyright "protection", artists would be unable to support themselves.
For anyone familiar with the lives of most artists, this claim doesn't ring even nearly true, but it's hard to gather evidence either way, because the question quickly gets bogged down in definitional issues: who counts as an artist? Should we measure by popularity, by quality, by audience size, or by other factors? How do we correct for selection bias effects, such as the fact that bookstores tend to carry what publishers' marketing campaigns encourage them to, and those campaigns are subsidized by copyright-based revenues? Resolving such questions would make this a difficult survey, but if done rigorously it would be an invaluable data source.
(On the other hand, note that the industry never seems to provide evidence for their claims either. We hear a lot about how many billions of dollars illegal filesharing deprives publishers of, but we get no hard numbers on how much copyright royalties play a role in the economic lives of artists.)
Rick Falkvinge, leader of Sweden's Pirate Party, mentioned several times during his speaking tour in the San Francisco Bay Area that a recent Swedish survey indicated that 2% or less of artists' incomes derived from copyright-based revenues. That survey might be a good place to start, as would this article in First Monday.
-
Teacher's Guide
A guide for teachers that gives them ideas on how to distinguish between copying and plagiarism when instructing children in the classroom. For example, instead of telling children "Don't copy!", tell them "Don't lie!" — that is, don't claim you did work that really someone else did.
See this article for the inspiration behind this idea.
-
A Self-Printable Book on Copyright Reform
When QuestionCopyright.org board members Shinjoung Yeo and James Jacobs took the Internet Archive Bookmobile on tour in September of 2007, they found themselves wishing they had a short book about copyright reform they could print out on the spot and hand to people. When they came back, they suggested that QuestionCopyright.org write and "publish" such a book.
-
Targeted Liberations
Find works that would be good candidates for widespread participation (copying, re-editing, re-mixing), and whose authors or copyright holders might have reason to consider freeing them. Contact the controlling party, get the work liberated, then use the resulting activity as an example of what can happen when the world is free to share and make derivative works.
Two possible examples: Jung Chang and Jon Holliday's "Mao: The Unknown Story" (because volunteer translation and electronic transmission would enable it to reach many people for whom it would otherwise be inaccessible, but for whom it would be politically important); Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" (because many have asked that the mathematical ideas in the book be presented in a different, more compact prose style). Those are just two picked more or less at random. When we actually do this, we should hold open nominations for targets, to get some momentum behind the request: it may make the job of persuasion easier if we can show that a lot of people were interested in that particular work being liberated.
Targeted works should be important enough that there is inherent value in liberating them, but it is not necessary that they be bestsellers or widely famous. Interesting things are more likely to happen with works that have a small but intense following than with works that have a wide but diffuse following. Therefore, we should concentrate our energies on works whose liberation is likely to produce interesting results, not on works that were famous and interesting before their liberation but that might not become more interesting as a result of liberation.
-
Targeted Policy Encouragements
There are many organizations that cause content to be generated but that haven't thought much about what sorts of information distribution policies to encourage. For example, copyright policy on dissertations and faculty research at many universities and institutions is quite ad hoc: while many would happily permit the content generator to use a liberal license, or even put things into the public domain, most such institutions do not consciously encourage such behavior, even though to do so would be consistent with their mission.
Or another example: the San Francisco Bluegrass Festival brought in a ton of great performers, and as far as I know recorded everything live. But what are the terms of those recordings? What if the Festival were to encourage — not require, just encourage — performers to allow those performances to be released under liberal licenses? Or pay a bonus to those who do?
Similarly with music competitions, at least the ones that don't have contracts with record labels.
And foundations that fund journalism, or fiction, or... There are a lot of possibilities here.
-
Transparent Cease And Desist Processes
Items get taken down from web sites all the time due to cease-and-desist notices. Usually the item just disappears; if we're lucky, there's a notice saying "This video has been deleted" or something similar, but rarely is any reason given. Because the disappearance is mysterious, copyright doesn't get blamed. The people who go looking for that item know that it's not there, but they don't necessarily know that its absence is due to copyright enforcement.
It would be good if we could persuade some major distribution sites to alway give the reason why a file was taken down (they may have reasons for not wanting to divulge takedown notices publicly, however, so this could be difficult). Even better would be if the cease-and-desist provisions of the DMCA or a successor act included clauses prohibiting secrecy — that is, it wouldn't officially count as a cease-and-desist letter if it requires the recipient to keep the notice private. A takedown notice should always be publishable, without risk of further penalty from the sender. Those who use wield the law must do so in the sunlight, otherwise the public cannot know the true consequences of laws.
-
Law Student Survey / Academic Initiative
Virtually every law student we've talked has reported that their intellectual property law classes do not teach the history of copyright. Instead, the classes imply that copyright was created by the the U.S. Constitution, perhaps with some basis in British tradition; that it was a statutory monopoly designed to subsidize replication (rather than creation) is apparently never mentioned.
We can do two things about this. First, do a formal survey of law students to verify that they're being taught what we think they're being taught (this should be easier than some of the other proposed surveys, because law students are easy to find). Second, show up at legal conferences, particularly intellectual property law conferences, and give talks about the history of copyright and why it's important that it be taught accurately. We should develop some copiously-sourced handouts to go along with this, of course.
