Author: Karl Fogel

You landed on this page because you didn’t do anything wrong.

So, breathe.  Sit up straight :-).  You’re fine.

You didn’t do anything wrong.

You copied something.  Maybe it was a song, or a video, or some text.  All you did was make a copy of it.  You didn’t steal anything, you didn’t take false credit, you didn’t intercept or dilute money that belongs to someone else.  All you did was copy.  You took part in a ritual as old as the human race: the act of sharing a piece of culture or information.

Some people may try to make you feel bad about what you did.  They’ll tell you that by copying something, you took money out of the pocket of an artist (but you know you didn’t — in fact, you probably helped the artist by spreading their work).  They’ll call it “piracy”, as though making copies of things is somehow like board a ship on the high seas, stealing its cargo, and doing who-knows-what with the crew.  They’ll tell you that what you did is analogous to counterfeiting money (it’s not).  They might claim to you that the whole purpose of copyright is to supposed to be to provide artists with a stable income, even though that’s not why copyright was invented, copyright is not how most artists earn their livings anyway, and overall it probably does more harm to artists than it does good.

When these people tell you you’ve done something wrong, they’re asking you to help support a myth, but you’re under no obligation to go along.  In fact, we’d appreciate it if you’d point them to this page.

So don’t buy it.

We don’t mean “don’t buy the song”, of course.  You should absolutely buy the song (or movie, or CD or DVD) if you want to — though if you really want to support the artist, it’s often more efficient to just send them money, because that way there’s no monopoly-based organization in the middle skimming most of your support away (naturally, if you feel the intermediary is doing good work, then support them too; many publishers are providing a valuable service).  It might be that the copying you did, or contemplated doing, is illegal in the country where you did it — a lot of countries have laws against copying.  We encourage you to obey the laws in your jurisdiction.  We just mean don’t buy the argument.  Don’t give those laws authority over your emotions.  If you’ve copied something, don’t feel guilty.  You didn’t do anything wrong.

There are many practical and philosophical reasons for obeying a law you don’t agree with, but there is never a reason to feel guilty about breaking a law you don’t agree with.  If you broke a law against copying publicly-available data, and someone’s trying to make you feel bad about that, then send them here, or at least ask them to make a rigorous case for what they’re claiming.

Can they justify the position that humans shouldn’t be allowed to share culture freely?  If they’re saying that the economic concerns for artists are so great as to trump the serious civil liberties concerns with this position, do they have actual numbers to back that up?  Have they talked to the artists who have been hurt by copyright restrictions?  The translators who couldn’t translate because the law wouldn’t allow them to?  The teachers who couldn’t teach the material they needed?  The publishers and distributors who couldn’t bring great books and films to audiences?

Copying is not wrong, and you didn’t do anything wrong.  So don’t feel bad — just spread the word.

If you’d like to support Nina Paley’s work on her upcoming freely-licensed film Seder-Masochism, you can donate via the Question Copyright Artist-in-Residence Working Fund. Let me repeat that word for emphasis: “donate”. There.

(Donations are tax-deductible to the full extent permitted by law; see here for details.)

Nina’s trailer for Seder-Masochism has already received over 400,000 views on various video hosting sites (Internet Archive, Vimeo, YouKu, YouTube), and was written up in Ha’aretz yesterday. People who saw our tweet (yes, that’s a hint to retweet or redent) have have already started donating to the Working Fund. We encourage everyone who likes high-quality, free-licensed films to join the club!

Hey, everyone.  This is the time of year when QuestionCopyright.org traditionally slows down.  Our global headquarters empties out as everyone hits the road for some much-needed sunshine, family time, etc,

We may not be completely inactive this month, but let’s just say you probably don’t want QCO to be your primary news source for August.

See you in September, and enjoy your summer (or winter, if you’re in the Southern hemisphere).

The Atlantic magazine has put out its yearly Ideas Issue.  I always look forward to it — sure, not all of the ideas are great, and many are questionable, but that’s to be expected when a lot of ideas are gathered together.  They’re often still instructive, sometimes the more so for being deliberately provocative.

But every so often, there’s one whose most interesting characteristic is that it managed to get past the editors at all.  This year, it’s from Elizabeth Wurtzel, and it reads, in full:

Of the Founders’ genius ideas, few trump intellectual-property rights. At a time when Barbary pirates still concerned them, the Framers penned an intellectual-property clause—the world’s first constitutional protection for copyrights and patents. In so doing, they spawned Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Motown, and so on. Today, we foolishly flirt with undoing that. In a future where all art is free (the future as pined for by Internet pirates and Creative Commons zealots), books, songs, and films would still get made. But with nobody paying for them, they’d be terrible. Only people who do lousy work do it for free.

Er.  Where to start?  The vertigo-inducing ahistoricity?  The clumsy attempt at guilt-by-association through a spurious double mention of pirates?  The unexamined assumption that copyright restrictions are how artists get paid?

Or how about just with a rewrite:

Of the Founders’ genius ideas, few trump intellectual-property rights. At a time when Barbary pirates still concerned them, the Framers penned an intellectual-property clause—the world’s first constitutional protection for copyrights and patents—into a justly famous document that they composed for no compensation and that was in the public domain from the moment it was first published. In so doing, they spawned Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Motown, and so on. Today, we foolishly flirt with undoing that. In a future where all art is free (the future as pined for by Internet pirates and Creative Commons zealots), books, songs, and films would still get made. But with nobody paying for them, they’d be terrible. Only people who do lousy work do it for free.

My suggested edits are in red.

What they’re doing:

Zac Shaw of Mediapocalypse has just written one of the best explanations — and justifications — of the Free Culture movement we’ve yet seen: In Defense of Free Music: A Generational, Ethical High Road Over the Industry’s Corruption and Exploitation.

To understand what he’s responding to, you’ll need a bit of background…

Last week, a 20-year-old intern at NPR named Emily White wrote a post for NPR’s “All Songs Considered” blog, entitled “I Never Owned Any Music To Begin With“.  She described, quite eloquently, how her relationship to recorded music was the same as the rest of her generation’s, namely that they don’t see the point of owning physical media like CDs.  She gets her music on iTunes and other online services, and stores it in the cloud and on her playback devices.  She doesn’t see anything wrong with this.

From the point of view of someone steeped in the Free Culture movement, nothing Emily White said is controversial.  Indeed, it was if anything surprisingly tame: she took care to say that she rarely downloads songs illegally, but rather uses state-approved distribution channels, in part because she wants artists to get more money than they do under the old album-based model:

…I honestly don’t think my peers and I will ever pay for albums. I do think we will pay for convenience.

 

What I want is one massive Spotify-like catalog of music that will sync to my phone and various home entertainment devices. With this new universal database, everyone would have convenient access to everything that has ever been recorded, and performance royalties would be distributed based on play counts (hopefully with more money going back to the artist than the present model). All I require is the ability to listen to what I want, when I want and how I want it. Is that too much to ask?

Then David Lowery at The Trichordist (“Artists for an Ethical Internet”) wrote an impassioned response, “Letter to Emily White at NPR All Songs Considered“, that was really aimed at the Free Culture movement, using White as a proxy.  Lowery’s letter is worth reading: he’s clearly sincere, and is willing to pull out every rhetorical trick in his bag to make his case (including, unfortunately, some unfair ones).  I don’t think he makes a very good case, but he certainly put his heart into it.  His response got a huge amount of circulation, and the coverage appears to be still expanding.

Zac Shaw didn’t think Lowery made a good case either, but instead of just picking apart Lowery’s argument, Shaw constructed a convincing positive argument for the ethical solidity of the Free Culture movement’s position (which Emily White herself did not articulate, but it was Lowery’s real target, and Shaw was right to focus on it).

Enough introduction.  Read Zac Shaw’s article — it’s really, really good:

In Defense of Free Music: A Generational, Ethical High Road Over the Industry’s Corruption and Exploitation

Big news from Google — their regular Transparency Reports will now include information about content takedown requests!

This means that it’s about to get a lot easier to see and talk about the costs of copyright restrictions.  Some background: under U.S. law, Google can protect itself from infringement claims by promptly handling so-called “takedown requests”.  A takedown request is when a copyright owner or their agent asks Google to remove content from its servers (or, in the case of the search engine, from being included in search results) because continuing to offer the content would violate the owner’s copyright, and continuing to link to it in search results could be considered contributory infringement.

But how often are such requests made?  Who makes them?  Unless you worked at Google or a similarly large information-gathering organization, you’d have no way of knowing.

Now Google’s going to tell us.  From their announcement:

Today we’re expanding the Transparency Report with a new section on copyright. Specifically, we’re disclosing the number of requests we get from copyright owners (and the organizations that represent them) to remove Google Search results because they allegedly link to infringing content. We’re starting with search because we remove more results in response to copyright removal notices than for any other reason. So we’re providing information about who sends us copyright removal notices, how often, on behalf of which copyright owners and for which websites. As policymakers and Internet users around the world consider the pros and cons of different proposals to address the problem of online copyright infringement, we hope this data will contribute to the discussion.

The answer, by the way, turns out to be about a quarter of a million takedown requests per week and counting (and remember, they’re starting with just their search engine, so this doesn’t include YouTube or their other major content-aggregation areas yet).  Just imagine the bureaucracy load on both sides for processing that kind of quanitity — and imagine all the more interesting things that money could be going to, if it weren’t processing disputes arising from state-granted monopolies on culture.

Unfortunately, the law that put in place the takedown request system forgot to build in any penalty for fraudulent or abusive requests, which do happen.  In today’s announcement, Google acknowledged that they deal with mistaken requests too:

At the same time, we try to catch erroneous or abusive removal requests. For example, we recently rejected two requests from an organization representing a major entertainment company, asking us to remove a search result that linked to a major newspaper’s review of a TV show. The requests mistakenly claimed copyright violations of the show, even though there was no infringing content. We’ve also seen baseless copyright removal requests being used for anticompetitive purposes, or to remove content unfavorable to a particular person or company from our search results. We try to catch these ourselves, but we also notify webmasters in our Webmaster Tools when pages on their website have been targeted by a copyright removal request, so that they can submit a counter-notice if they believe the removal request was inaccurate.

Their excellent FAQ offers more examples of incorrect requests they’ve received.  It’s not clear if they’ll be publishing statistics on that, but they do link to a 2006 third-party analysis that found a “surprisingly high incidence of flawed takedowns”.

Kudos to Google for shining a light where it has been dark for far too long!

Question Copyright is looking for a trusts & estates lawyer for some quick pro bono help with an interesting new initiative.  If you are one, or know one, please contact us.  Thanks!

Zinger quote from full-time artist (and QCO reader) Gwenn Seemel:

I’m fascinated by how artists say that their adherence to copyright is about money (even when they aren’t making a living with their work) but that when you dig a little deeper it comes out that it’s about fear.  It’s about the fear that someone will do what you’re doing but do it better than you ever did.

Thanks to reader Osama Khalid for telling us about another use of Nina Paley‘s Minute Meme Copying Is Not Theft on Al Jazeera — in this case, using it exactly as we hope the Minute Memes will be used: to set the frame or introduce the issues for a discussion. It’s played near the beginning, at about 2:30:

And it’s followed by a fantastic interview with Rick Falkvinge, in which he explains why Pirate Party resonates with so many people and why its political philosophy is deeply connected with civil liberties.

(This is not the first time that “Copying Is Not Theft” has appeared on Al Jazeera.)