Guest Blogger: "ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe"
QuestionCopyright.org welcomes Guest Blogger Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was the third President of the United States (1801–1809), the principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776), and one of the most influential Founding Fathers for his promotion of the ideals of republicanism in the United States.
It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors.
It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society.
It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.
NYC Re/Mixed Media Festival 2010: Paying it forward
A new film festival is starting up in New York City, and it's friendly to Free Culture:
"The Re/Mixed Media Festival celebrates remix as a legitimate, responsible form of visual art by bringing together filmmakers, video remixers and mashup artists to display their works publicly. The festival will be held in Brooklyn, NY in May of 2010... We are currently soliciting films that utilize remix/mashup techniques, and that are under 10 minutes in length. Additionally, your film should comply with the following guidelines:
- Remix does not mean stealing someone else's work and claiming it as your own, but using it to create a work that is substantially different from the appropriated work, even if it depends heavily on it.
- The materials used in the remix should be either owned by the artist, granted permission from use from the creator, licensed under a creative commons license which allows such use, in the public domain, or fall within the parameters of the Fair Use doctrine of U.S. Copyright Law.
- Attribution for works used will be given where required.
- To be considered for the festival, submitted works must be freely redistributable, except as limited by source material restrictions.
(Emphasis added.)
It's very encouraging to see point 4! That's "freely" as in "freedom", if my brief conversation about it with with Tom Tenney, one of the organizers of the festival, is any guide. It's great that the festival is ensuring that the works they show be freely useable by others — remix artists, of all people, understand the importance of this. And as the Sita Distribution Project is showing, being pro-sharing can actually help the artists economically.
Sketching is copying; copying is stealing. Coming soon: no breathing.
This may be old news for art students, but for the rest of us it's still kind of amazing to see cultural institutions like museums buying into the "copying is stealing" myth by prohibiting sketching.
In some cases, the copying restrictions are imposed by a lender — it would be interesting to know how often the lender imposes restrictions on works that are not under copyright, or that would not otherwise be restricted.
Nina Paley collected some examples after the jump. Know any others?
EFF "Hall of Shame" Highlights Copyright Used as Censorship
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has just unveiled their Takedown Hall of Shame, which highlights examples of copyright law being used to suppress political commentary and creative expression. Many of the examples involve abuses of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), whose takedown provisions encourage Internet hosting companies to remove content on the mere assertion of infringement by a copyright holder.
The EFF's list focuses on corporate takedown notices, but it's important to understand that it's not only corporations that suppress speech via copyright law. The copyright monopoly system encourages people to do it to each other too; we've collected some examples of that.
So what's the solution?
The real solution is radical reform of copyright law (there are plenty of alternatives). But even without that, there's still an easy solution: fix the DMCA to have a penalty for delivering improper takedown notices. Say, a penalty of five years off the copyright term of the covered work, for each wrong notice sent about that work. Content monopolists would start being a lot more careful if they had something to lose when they get a takedown notice wrong.
At the Association of Moving Image Archivists Conference, Nov. 5-7
UPDATE: slides from the presentation are now available: problem-of-open-media.pdf or problem-of-open-media.odp (OpenDocument Presentation format).
Any copyright reformers in St. Louis? I'll be attending the annual conference of the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) in St. Louis from Nov. 5th-7th, as will QuestionCopyright.org board members Jeff Ubois and Brewster Kahle.
On Saturday, Nov. 7th, from 10:45-11:45am, I'll be on a panel entitled The Problem of Open Media, organized by Jack Brighton of Illinois Public Media, with Rick Prelinger (Prelinger Library & Archives), Suzanne M. Fischer (the Henry Ford), and Peter Kaufman (Intelligent Television).
It might be clarifying to call the panel "The Problem of Closed Media" or "The Problem of Monopolized Content"... but then, perhaps that's exactly the sort of discussion to save for the panel! It should be a good session. Here's the description:
Criminalizing the normal normalizes the criminal.
There's a very interesting article over at TechRadar about how draconian copyright infringement penalties actually give copyright monopoly holders a motivation to encourage infringement:
In a somewhat cynical table-turning exercise, a German anti-piracy body seems to be encouraging illegal downloading of music and other media in an effort to strong-arm money out of lawbreakers.
DigiRights Solutions (DRS) from Darmstadt has circulated a presentation to potential clients explaining how they might make more money by pursuing illegal filesharers than from regular, legal sales. ...
"We Are Creators Too": Art Brodsky of Public Knowledge Interviews Nina Paley
Art Brodsky of Public Knowledge interviewed Nina Paley about copyright restrictions and her experiences trying to get her film Sita Sings the Blues past the copyright gatekeepers. The original interview is at "We Are Creators Too. Part 1 of 4. Today, Nina Paley's Story", part of the PK TV Series. We had it transcribed:
Proposing CC-PRO: A License For Professionals
What's the best license for professionals to use? Our fantasy answer is CC-PRO, the Creative Commons license we'd like to see...
"Artists Should Be Compensated For Their Work"
(Translations: Polski.)
Nina Paley is the author of the freely-licensed hit animated film Sita Sings the Blues, among many other things, and is Artist in Residence at QuestionCopyright.org. She is also a committed Free Culture activist who writes frequently about copyright and how the permission culture affects art and artists.
This phrase comes up in many discussions of copyright: "Artists should be compensated for their art." It is assumed that a) Artists are inherently entitled to monetary compensation for their Art, and b) copyright is a mechanism for this compensation.
I challenge both assumptions.
Of course, what people actually say is usually "Artists should be compensated for their work". Below I'm going to distinguish between Art and Work, because confusing the two is exactly the problem.
a) Artists are inherently entitled to monetary compensation for their work.
I agree that artists are entitled to payment FOR THEIR WORK.
WORK is labor exchanged for money. Employer and worker negotiate a fee, the labor is performed, and the worker is paid. Many artists are workers: they are waiters, baristas, truck drivers. They should be compensated for their work, and they are, which is why they work.
Some artists perform a kind of skilled labor for money. This type of pre-negotiated labor is called a commission. Commissioned work is work, and artists are compensated for it, which is why artists take commissions.
Wanted: Examples of Copyright Being Used For Censorship
Do you know some great examples of copyright being used to censor?
If so, please share them by commenting here or by sending us email. We're putting together a presentation about the equivalence between copyright and censorship, and need to have an overwhelming number of examples at hand — enough to make it clear that the ones we choose to highlight have been picked from an ocean of candidates. We need compelling examples because the most important ones are the hardest to show: when an artist unconsciously steers away from an idea because of rights issues, that is censorship, but it is internalized and thus invisible to the outside world. We need examples to help make clear the link between visible, externally-imposed censorship and the much more common self-imposed censorship that copyright law encourages.
A great starting point is the Electronic Frontier Foundations's Takedown Hall of Shame, listing people and organizations who have used copyright law (especially the DMCA) to squash criticism.
But situations where copyright suppresses art itself are just as important, and are just as much censorship as political censorship is. Some examples:
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J.D. Salinger uses copyright to censor another author.
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The James Joyce Estate bans non-cooperating editions of Joyce's works.
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How the play Blanche Survives Katrina in a FEMA Trailer Named Desire ran into a streetcar named censorship.
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The story of Sita Sings the Blues: how copyright almost prevented a popular and award-winning film from reaching audiences.
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The story of Eyes on the Prize: how copyright prevented an important film from reaching audiences for years.
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The same story yet again: copyright prevented the film Killer of Sheep from being released for 30 years.
The audience we're aiming at is groups already concerned about freedom of expression who may not have considered copyright as a systemic form of censorship. For example, the American Library Association's Intellectual Freedom Roundtable, the Index On Censorship, and the Authors Guild. Note that such groups are often comprised of writers and artists who came of age in the pre-Internet, copyright-controlled era, so it is especially important to have an overwhelming amount of data to show that there is a problem here.
The Free Expression Policy Project seems to already have copyright-based censorship on their radar screen; there's probably some good stuff in the archives there. Also, if you're an artist who has been affected by this kind of censorship, we definitely want to hear from you!
