The New York Times, one of the world’s widely known daily newspapers (aka the Gray Lady due to its staid appearance and style), as well as its Internet branch, nytimes.com, has published an article pertaining to how copyright has downsized us in the past. This particular article, The Tyranny of Copyright?, written by Robert S. Boynton, is what this rendition of mine is based upon.
Sometime last fall at Swarthmore College, a local group of students uptook a fateful lesson involving political protest as well as its future. What they didn’t realize is that they witnessed a whopping 15,000 e-mails and memos–whether they might have been leaked or taken away–in their custody. These e-mails and memos were from one of the country’s largest electronic voting machine manufacturers, Diebold Election Systems. In these particular memos, a discussion was taken up by the company’s employees, involving bugs in the industry’s technology and guidelines, which led to the unsatisfyingly poor safeguarding against hackers. Looking back at–and reminiscent to–the insidious presidential election of 2000, the students of Swarthmore figured that there was no way that this certain type of info would stay private. Ambitious as they might be with their promising reports, compared to those of Daniel Ellsberg, they began web-posting the files, which pretty much made the act a method of electronic awakening.
However, the students’ quest for vital information has taken a wrong turn for the worst—their activity has broken one of several recent laws that has been adapting intellectual property as well as developing the culture in a discreet way, this being the 1998 DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act). Considering the purpose that this act was fashioned for—protecting copyrighted Web material—and under this act, Internet service providers (ISPs) are in complete control of user-posted material; on the other hand, this is the kind of overwhelming anxiety that phone services don’t share with the ISPs. According to this alleged law, when oppressed parties (i.e. Diebold) threatens, in any form, to accuse ISPs over the content/details of subscrip-tion-based Web Sites, the provider can abstain liability by directly taking out irritating data. As long as the minor bluff of a bill is commonly sufficient to shock most providers into yielding, the law thoroughly offers private parties the power to veto–or cancel acts—over the majority of the material posted on the Web—a vital lesson that the Swarthmore students should soon learn.
Letters were sent by Diebold to Swarthmore, concerning the charge of copyright infringement, as well as a demand for the removal of information from the students’ college server-hosted Web page, which took place not too long ago after the memos were posted by the students themselves. That very moment, Swarthmore adhered to this request, and suddenly, a question arose—pertaining to whether or not the students had rights to post the memo—which essentially rendered itself undecided. Because of the DMCA, the students’ commentary would come to an abrupt silence without any form of lawful service and/or due process (i.e. public hearings, judges, lawsuits). Following steadfast challenges carried out by the students—as well as a large-scale measure of disregard for Diebold—the company did their fair share in complying not to press any charges. The memos that were posted are now back on the students’ website, especially to the surprise of their supporters. However, to free speech enthusiasts on the Internet, this will still be a story of epic chills, and a macabre one at that.
A New York University (NYU) media scholar, Siva Vaidhyanathan, refers to these types of anecdotes as “copyright horror stories”, considering the fact that there has been a prospering amount of these recently–a few years back, give or take. Formerly, it was one of the American legal system’s draggy parts–and an illusively lifeless one at that–where intellectual property can immediately found in the focus of dominant conflicts centering around the arts, sciences and politics–according to the case with Diebold. There were previous cases pertaining to all things, going from repeated efforts for obligating the Girl Scouts organization’s compensation payment for singing campfire songs, to a violation cause carried out by Margaret Mitchell and her estate in opposition to the publicists behind “The Wind Done Gone,” one of Alice Randall’s timeless novels–which, in fact, is a retelling of Mitchell’s original “Gone With the Wind” from the POV of a slave–to Celera Genomics, and other various corporations taking in human genes by classifying patients. For instance, in September, when the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) started accusing music downloaders for atrocious crimes–those including copyright infringement–which led to aiming for compensations for countless amounts of money with youth defendants (12 at the youngest), one of the country’s most influential elaborations arose. Not to mention the November incident where an independent film producer clique went straight to court for a never-ending struggle with the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), and its newly-appointed ban: the sale of DVDs to annual film award voters.
Not much earlier, the Internet’s profound motto ”information wants to be free”–that was the motto that proclaimed their expertise in bestowing upon us rapid, nominal, and defectless replicas of sound, images, and text. However, the hypotheses pertaining to this opportunity has given some authors–specifically those in the music, cinema, and book businesses–a distracting shock, and it’s these type of people that altercate that copying and distributing is the biggest cinch for boosting up the desire for the most rigorous rules involving intellectual property. As for the recording and cinema businesses, they have fulfilled their goals in influencing the legislators to make them hold on to their latest works by further extending the terms of copyright. The copyright safeguarding scope has also been lengthened as well, through the design of what numerous critics describe as a ‘paracopyright’–the idea in which the duplication of protected data, as well as even obtaining access to this kind of data is permanently gridlocked. Not only that–adding to the DMCA is the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act, one of the most compelling examples of new constitution and order which threw in an extra couple of decades (20 years to be exact) of custody to both ancient and existing copyrighted information. Within under 10 years, the Internet’s often-adduced, unchained capacity indicated that it must have opened the doors to a mental incarceration governed by media-industry administrators and and attorneys.
Acknowledging these advances, a demonstration crusade, composed of advocates, educators, and bigots, has been put together because they anticipated that copyright safekeeping reinforcement, especially that for the sake of eliminating ‘piracy,’ was enough to trigger a dramatic aftermath toward the general public–thus impeding its experimentation/creation capacity and letting our democracy get worn away bit by bit. This revolutionary brigade–referred to by a Stanford Law School professor by the aptly-named Lawrence Lessig as the ‘free culture movement’—may as well be often envisioned as the idea where words used primarily by software developers to indicate that their material bore way less than the constant copyright restriction quantity, hence the pseudonym, the ‘Copy Left.’ As for the advocates and instructors from America’s top colleges and law Schools, who are pretty much a part of the Copy Left brigade—they are apathetic fascists who are in favor of copyright use, despite their vehement and menacing counteraction to Diebold (as well as other companies in comparison to this one) and how its recent regulation/conspiracy has been causing a major warp in copyright. In addition, these people—the Copy Left, to be specific—don’t even share rational beliefs pertaining to the idea of politics. The only thing that they allocate through this matter is the country is wasting away in terms of freedom and creativity. According to them, although the copyright system of America was devised for the inspiration of a newfangled idea, that system is now being tricked into its own restraint. Through this concept, they envision themselves as struggling for a conventional intuition involving intellectual property through the eyes of a definite attempt to transform copyright law into an idea-collecting apparatus. Conforming with Jonathan Zittrain, a co-founder at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and referred to most as the Copy Left’s intellectual focus, he points out the fact that ”intellectual property rights should never expire, and works never enter the public domain,” and that “this is the truly fanatical and unconstitutional position.”
In comparison to Lessig and Zittrain, these geniuses consider themselves contributors to the perception of a system in which indivisible originators are received the exclusive means to benefit from their original information, according to copyright law, for an instantaneously concise term, then carry out their motivation to originate as they still let alternating contemporaries in on this concept to depict upon foremost ideas at will. These people accentuate on two ideas: a) how all creation is composed of adapting and participating, and b) how the enticement of the ‘author’s’ charming allegory confronts attention; that allegory being that the isolated, homely author, making astounding feats out of nothing. Yale Law School professor Yochai Benkler replies, ”No one writes from nothing/We all take the world as it is and use it, remix it.”
There’s no telling where the Copy Left thinks creations need to be sent to when the copyright runs into a fault; for some suggestions, they could go either into the PD (public domain) or the ‘cultural commons,’ an assorted idea inventory where most of American songs and books/poems would stay in, and people can get their hands on easily without payment or consent. Duke Law School professor James Boyle commentates that the public domain is the only place to advance on our civil and artistic qualities, not so much to bask in its delight. He wrote that “Our art, our culture, our science depend on this public domain; every bit as much as they depend on intellectual property.”
Going back to the Copy Left, their secret weapon against the cultural commons is a title used as a description for the world created by our now-abridged copyright law, considering their angst towards that certain type of world—known as the ‘permission culture.’ Although you originally kept a work of music or literature, in this culture, it’s an even greater chance that you’ll borrow any of these pieces of intellectual property,—whether it’s a song, video, and/or e-book—and after that, by these exclusory rules, the e-book is meant to be read, but the selections cannot be copied or pasted—same thing with music on MP3 players; they’re meant to be listened to, but not burned to CDs or transferred to stereo. Apple’s most renowned Internet music store/program, iTunes, is considered a primary step towards a culturally active society by the Copy Left, and that society involves imperative things (i.e. going to public libraries and reading encyclopedias, selling academic-related textbooks to colleagues, transferring tunes for relatives, the list goes on and on), which will be later sent back through a micropayment process for every part of our culture stripped off. According to a philosophy by the ALA(American Library Association)’s legislative counsel, Miriam Nisbet, “Sooner or later, you’ll get to the point where you say, ‘Well, I guess that 25 cents isn’t too much to pay for this sentence,’ and then there’s no hope and no going back.”
After reading this article—and it’s not like I never had any concern for the last four parts—I think that according to copyright law, and considering every other aspect pertaining to copyright, we should be careful about these aspects, though there might be a variety of luxuries that it offers us. In other words, every device that we carry, we should use them discreetly, and try not to overuse them to the point where it could drive the entire public insane.
