Question Copyright

By far the most popular article on this site (over half a million views now and counting) is The Surprising History of Copyright and the Promise of a Post-Copyright World.  Courtesy of Antonín Houska, it is now available in Czech (česky): Překvapivá historie copyrightu a příslib světa po něm.

Thank you, Antonín!

It’s also been translated into Chinese, Polish, Latvian, and Italian.  We’re very grateful to all the translators; it’s a lot of work for a piece of that length.  But the existence of these translations should also serve as a reminder of the vast amount of material in the world that would be translated if it weren’t restricted by copyright monopolies — a topic we’ve covered in depth before.

Happy New Year, everyone.  Let’s try to have more freedom in 2016 than we did in 2015.

This 18-minute talk is by far the best explanation I’ve seen yet of why you should question copyright.

In the last few years, I’ve watched QCO Artist-in-Residence Nina Paley refine her message about the harm of copyright and permission culture. Now it’s the most direct and most effective it’s ever been. If you want just one video to show people to explain to them what this movement is about, let this be the one. Nina tells an appreciative audience why she had to set her mind free in order to make art, and shows some wonderful clips from her next film Seder-Masochism — a film that simply couldn’t be made within the permission culture that Nina diagnoses so eloquently:

We’ve written about the Happy Birthday lawsuit here before.  Now it seems the case has reached a turning point — a “smoking gun” has been found, thanks to research in the files of the pro-monopoly side, Warner/Chappell: a copy of the “Happy Birthday” lyrics from 1922, that is, before the present-day copyright horizon.

The story (courtesy of Hollywood Reporter) is pretty fascinating in itself, but let’s go to town on the amazing claim Warner/Chappell seems to be making in response to this new discovery.  After all, what is QuestionCopyright.org for, if not going to town on the most absurd claims of the monopoly industry?

What Warner/Chapell seems to be saying is that even if it were found that the song lyrics existed in their current form in 1922 — that is, earlier than the current “earliest copyright horizon” — the fact that the 1922 copy of those lyrics might have been, at that time, a possible copyright infringement (which it obviously wasn’t, but we’ll leave that aside in order to grant the widest possible latitude to Warner/Chapell’s argument, for our own entertainment if nothing else) means that maybe the copyrights claimed later in 1935 are somehow still valid.  Or something?

But the mere existence of a version of a work before the horizon means that, even if that copy were in an copyright-infringing state at the time, whatever copyright it was infringing then must, clearly, have expired by now.  Because otherwise, the copyright horizon is not really a copyright horizon.  Unless you live in a world where time runs backwards and sideways, as Warner/Chapell perhaps does.

What this lawsuit really shows is what we’ve been arguing is the problem with broad information monopoly rights in general: once the state creates a monopoly, it creates a monopolist who owns it — or in this case imagines themselves to own it — and that monopolist will fight to the bitter end to keep it, against all reason and all evidence.  There is normally no representative of the public who has as clear and focused an interest in a given monopoly as its putative owner does; we just got lucky in this case that a filmmaker decided to take an interest in this one song.

Who will stand up for all the other songs?

QCO Artist-in-Residence Nina Paley did an AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) on Reddit today, for “Fair Use” Week:

“Cartoonist, animator, and activist Nina Paley here to talk about making art and fair use!”

She was joined by lawyer Sherwin Siy of Public Knowledge.

My favorite exchange from the AMA:

Q: Hi Nina! Big fan of Sita Sings the Blues. As you may probably be aware, the right-wing moral policing is at an all time high in India. What are your thoughts on censorship and its implications on artists?

A: Censorship: all the more reason to keep my work Free, open and decentralized. Centralized distribution is easy to censor. Decentralized distribution is impossible to censor.

Q: Is there such a thing as good censorship?

A: http://mimiandeunice.com/2011/06/07/censorship-vs-copyright/

See the full AMA here.

Snowdrift.coop has been quietly building a platform for sustainably supporting libre digital works — “a matching patronage system funding freely-licensed works”, in their words.  Snowdrift is trying something different: instead of the all-or-nothing, one-time lump sum style of funding that gets lots of projects out of the starting gate but doesn’t stay with them as they grow, Snowdrift has developed a peer-matched patronage model in which people say “I’ll give a certain amount more for every person who joins me in funding this project, up my personal limit”.  See their illustrated introduction for an overview, or their detailed explanation.

Snowdrift.coop is now very close to launch, and they’ve been running a funding campaign to get the last pieces put in place.  They’ve received generous support from Linux Fund and Aleph Objects, among others (I just donated $50 myself).  If you think a sustainable funding platform for free/libre digital works is a good idea — and I’m betting you probably do, if you’re here reading this — then please donate to the Snowdrift.coop launch campaign today (and select a donation reward, including customized Snowdrift snow gear at a high enough donation level).

Yes, Snowdrift is an experiment, but it’s a good idea and has the chance to create a new world of sustainable crowdfunding for libre works.  If it succeeds, we all win.

Here’s that donation page again.

Happy New Year!

For the remainder of 2014 — just a few hours, depending on your time zone — a supporter is matching donations to the Internet Archive at 2-to-1.  If you give $50, that’s $150 total for the Archive.

Please donate now.  The Internet Archive saves the Internet… literally!  From founder Brewster Kahle’s end-of-year message:

I’ve always believed in libraries. The digital world is no different. We need a library for the digital generation. A place we can all go to learn and explore.

 

Our children will learn from whatever is accessible to them. As parents, teachers and librarians, we should put the best we have to offer within reach of our children. At the Internet Archive we are striving to make our cultural treasures accessible to everyone. Forever.

 

Technologically—we now have the possibility of doing this–making knowledge massively accessible.

 

At the Internet Archive, we’ve preserved 430 billion web pages. People download 20 million books on our site each month. We get more visitors in a year than most libraries do in a lifetime. The key is to keep improving—and to keep it free. That’s where you can help us.

 

The Internet Archive is a non-profit library built on trust. We don’t run ads. We don’t sell your personal information—in fact, to protect your privacy we don’t even save your IP address. But we still need to pay for servers, staff and bandwidth.

I just gave $100, resulting in $300 for the Internet Archive.  Please make me look cheap!

FSCONS 2014 in Göteborg, Sweden is wonderful: a whole conference of people deeply committed to freedom and actively implementing it.

My keynote talk at 2pm today is entitled “Invisible Monopolies and the Language of Freedom”; clicking that link will take you to the slides.

Among other things, I’ll be talking about the origins and history of copyright, about censorship of translations, about the words we use, about the Declared-Value System, and of course about the BookLiberator (which you can buy from our online store or build yourself).

That’s all for now.  Back to the conference!