Author: Karl Fogel

This proposal is a rewrite of one we first ran five years ago here at QCO. Since then, meaningful copyright (and patent) reform proposals have gradually been gaining ground. You know you’re making progress when someone gets fired from the U.S. Republican Study Committee for writing a policy brief that speaks sanely about copyright. Because the policy climate is changing, we’re re-introducing our proposal (cross-posted at Falkvinge on Infopolicy and the Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom) with an updated and clarified explanation. For many readers, it still won’t go far enough — it’s not abolition, for example. But proposals like this succeed first by reframing debate. In this case, the point is that if a government is going to offer private monopolies at all, it should at least reserve the public a way to ease them.

What would a truly free-market approach to copyrights and patents look like?

The problem we have right now is this:

The flat green line represents the value to the public of de-monopolizing the work — think of it as “what the public would be willing to pay for unrestricted access”. The point where the curved blue slope crosses the green line is the point where there is no longer any public or private purpose to having a monopoly. From that moment on, the value of the monopoly to the rights-owner is equal to or less than the value of de-monopolization. Yet today, the monopoly continues beyond that point. The green line is simply ignored in the current system: we pretend it does not exist.

You might think there’s already a market solution. After all, in the current system, anyone could in theory be offered a fixed sum to liberate their work into the public domain [1]. But markets don’t quite work the way we’d hope. This is is why we have eminent domain in real property, for example. As soon as someone starts talking about building an airport in some farm fields, all of a sudden every farmer decides their field is worth ten times as much as it was the day before, such that no airports could ever be built if we did not use the pre-rumor valuations. It is the same with copyrights and patents: the mere expression of interest in re-use drives up the price instantly, and the perpetual optimism of rights-holders ends up stretching their monopoly past its natural market end — hurting everyone else and preventing further re-use, yet frequently without realizing the benefit the rights-holder hoped for. We all lose.

But unlike with land, there’s a way out, because there’s a third thing we can do besides sell or not sell: we can liberate. That makes all the difference.

Finding The Liberation Point

Suppose things worked this way instead — I’ll use copyrights for the sake of discussion, but this applies to patents too:

A new work gets an initial automatic copyright term, as it does today but perhaps shorter: maybe a few months from publication, enough to ensure there’s time for the owner to register the work if they wish to extend the monopoly.

If the copyright owner does not register, the work simply enters the public domain [2].

If the copyright owner registers, then the copyright continues. Registration, which is renewable annually, requires paying a registration fee that is proportional to the current self-declared value of the work. That is, the copyright owner picks a number of dollars (yuan, euros, whatever) that she claims the work is worth. It can be any number at all, but the yearly registration fee will be a percentage of it — for discussion’s sake, say 1%. The exact proportions don’t matter here: it could be 0.5% or 2% instead of 1%, registration could be semi-yearly instead of yearly, etc. The idea is the same, regardless of how you set the knobs.

Now comes the key:

Since that declared value is now a matter of public record, anyone can pay that amount to the copyright owner to liberate the work into the public domain. This is not a purchase, it is a liberation. Prior to liberation — whether it comes through payment or through term expiration — people would still be free to sell or lease their copyrights, for whatever price they can get (which, interestingly, may be higher or lower than the registered value — the market dynamics behind that decision are just as rich as those involved in determining exclusivity value under today’s copyright system). But whoever the owner is, whether the author or someone else, they’re responsible for keeping up the registration. And while the work is still under registration, anyone can come along and pay the registered owner the declared value to liberate it.

Liberation, unlike purchase or lease, is a mandatory transaction. The justification is that since the registrant chose the price in the first place, it is by definition fair: it was self-declared. Furthermore, these are after all public monopolies, and the public’s ultimate interest is in having works be available without restriction. For governments to hand out monopolies with no escape clause has always been an abdication of responsibility. If there is a way to fix that, we should take it.

The copyright holder has an incentive not to declare too high a value, because she’ll have to pay a percentage of it to register; she has an incentive not to declare too low, because then someone will come along and liberate the work very quickly at a low price (though some artists will find that liberation is economically a better deal for them anyway, and simply not register, or register at a declared value of zero in order to get a timestamp for attribution purposes).

Because the value of a work may change over time, the registrant may adjust the declared value up or down each year when renewing the registration [3]. This is also one of the reasons behind that brief initial registration-free monopoly term: it gives the copyright holder a chance to judge the work’s monopoly value, information she can use to decide how much to register the work for.

Whether indefinite renewal should be available is an open question. Personally I think not, for two reasons: first, because there has simply never been a compelling argument for perpetual copyright and most jurisdictions do not have it. Second, because awareness of an approaching horizon will pressure registrants to set lower liberation prices as that horizon comes closer — which is the right direction for things to move, from the public’s point of view, since even the most confident authors cannot reliably predict years ahead of time which monopolies will remain valuable, and therefore far-future valuations do not have a significant incentivizing effect anyway.

But even if indefinite renewal were permitted, the system still has desirable effects. The tendency of monopolies to accumulate in media conglomerates (who then press for Internet censorship to preserve those monopolies) would be greatly lessened by the cost of maintaining all those registrations. Forced to choose which assets are really valuable, the companies would have to lower the liberation values for many works, thus providing the fertile ground for re-use and innovation that artists, other publishers, and the rest of us are denied under the current system.

On “Balance”

While this proposal is a compromise, it’s at least a compromise tilted toward the public interest. By analogy, think of a homeowner who cuts a driveway opening onto a public street in order to gain access to a private garage. If I take a streetside parking space away from the public, I expect to pay the city (that is, the public) a fee, and usually annually, too, not just a one-time fee. Similarly, a copyright owner who wants to keep a work out of the public domain should pay for that privilege. But unlike a garage, this privilege need not be permanent, because losing monopoly control over a work is not as serious as losing one’s indoor parking space.

This system would go a long way toward alleviating the orphan works problem, by ensuring that the copyright owner of a work could always be found (someone must be paying the fees over at the registry), and toward alleviating the ghost works problem (in which derivative works are suppressed), by setting a maximum amount of money that, in the age of Kickstarter, would usually still be attainable by a motivated party who wanted to see that work in the public domain.

The copyright lobby frequently talks of finding an appropriate “balance” between the needs of creators and the needs of the public. Like many appeals to balance, it is a smokescreen for something else: in this case, for efforts to increase copyright terms and restrictions beyond their already absurd lengths. The “balance” they’re talking about neatly presupposes that creators and the public are somehow on opposite sides, while multinational content monopoly conglomerates are, curiously, absent from the picture altogether. (Their portrayal is also historically suspect, as copyright was primarily designed to subsidize distributors not creators anyway.)

Thanks to this focus on exclusivity-based balance, proposals to improve the system are usually minor tweaks: broader “fair use” rights, a more thorough prior-art discovery process, various changes in scope, etc. But these approaches leave the basic problem untouched: when a copyright or patent is granted today, it creates a monopoly with no countervailing pressure towards a true free market.

There needs to be a market-based representation of the value of de-monopolization, expressible by those whom de-monopolization benefits. In Macaulay’s famous words, “the effect of monopoly generally is to make articles scarce, to make them dear, and to make them bad.” [4] Anyone familiar with, for example, the mess George Lucas made of his monopoly on the “Star Wars” movies will instantly see Macaulay’s point. The problem is not that Lucas botched the sequels, but that the Lucasfilm monopoly prevents anyone else from doing better. This is the problem with monopolies generally — it’s not what they let the monopoly owner do, it’s what they don’t let others do. Monopolies are the opposite of free markets.

The Liberation Point system introduces de-monopolization as a market force, without involving the government in pricing decisions, term-length calibrations, or other arbitrary regulatory judgements [5]. The system takes “balance” seriously: it gives the rights-holder a decisive role in setting a valuation and benefitting from it, but at the same time represents the public’s interest in not having works monopolized forever. Crucially, it avoids the need for complicated regulatory formulas, which would inevitably create a target surface for monopoly interests to aim lobbying power at. Instead, it gives the public a mechanism for representing its own interests directly, with the government limited to a bookkeeping role.

The proposal is not merely rhetorical. I would be delighted, if surprised, for it to receive legislative interest. But it is also meant to expand the range of the possible. Fiddling with copyright term lengths and improving the Patent Office’s processes feel good, but they are fundamentally repainting a burning barn. To get lasting improvement, we need to permanently reduce the “lobbyability” of the system as a whole. The Liberation Point method is one way to do that [6], and to show that market-tempered monopoly is possible in principle. It’s high time these kinds of solutions were on the table.

References:

[1] The term “public domain” is used informally here. It is a term of art in copyright law more than in patent law, but it is easy to intuitively understand what it would mean for patents: that no one has a monopoly, that is, there is no one with the power to restrict usage.

[2] There should be nothing shocking about this: the public domain is the natural destination for works, and even most proponents of lengthening copyright and patent terms pay lip service to that goal. Furthermore, registration requirements used to be the norm if one wanted to hold any public monopoly. Indeed, the requirement for copyrights was only eliminated under the theory that insisting on registration gave advantage to corporations who had economies of scale to streamline the paperwork involved in filing — which was probably true, in the days before the Internet, but today registration would be as easy as uploading a file and receiving a digitally-signed timestamp.

[3] Alternatively, the owner could be allowed to adjust the declared value at any time (perhaps even as a reaction to liberation offers), with the provision that any upward adjustment would require immediate payment of the difference between the old and new registration fees. However, the public domain would probably be better served by simply allowing adjustment only at fixed intervals: if the owner of a work can’t figure out its market value and set the fee accordingly, that is no reason to favor the owner over the public when the work is being liberated at a price the owner clearly once thought sufficient.

[4] en.wikisource.org/wiki/Copyright_Law_(Macaulay)

[5] One of the problems with not having a systematized and predictable path to de-monopolization is that we instead get unpredictable decisions like India’s decision to set a compulsory license rate on a drug still under patent. The point is not that the Indian government made a mistake — the decision was quite defensible — but that handling each such instance as a special case inevitably leads to lack of predictability and, eventually, to corruption. Yet it’s governments that issue patent monopolies in the first place: if they can set compulsory license rates in specific cases, then they can offer a mechanism for de-monopolization in the general case.

[6] My colleague Nina Paley has suggested a simpler system: bring back registration, and set the fee for the first year at $1, the second year at $2, the third year at $4, then $8, $16, $32, $64, and so on. This has the advantage of immediate comprehensibility, and it’s clearly effective at tempering the monopoly: very few works would remain restricted past the 20 year mark, and her system doesn’t need to be adjusted for inflation for a long time.

[7] For works released under a free license, the fee should be waived, and indeed the requirement to register or renew at all should be waived, because such licenses are non-monopolistic by definition. For simplicity’s sake I did not mention this in the original proposal. Richard Stallman immediately noticed the problem; I thank him for pointing it out, as that reminded me to add this footnote.

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.