Curiouser and Curiouser!

Curiouser and Curiouser! on copyright http://matt.blogs.it/ RSS feed for topic copyright Copyright 2006 Matt Mower Squib/0.1 self@mattmower.com self@mattmower.com en-gb This is my line of death. You cross this line, you die! Wed, 14 Aug 2002 14:35:54 +0100 Okay I've had a belly full of reading about the DCMA, the <A href="http://cryptome.org/sssca.htm">SSSSCA</A> and the new <A href="http://bugbear.blackfish.org.uk/~bruno/2001_29_ec.txt">EUCD</A>.  I despair about the politicians of whom the most charitable thing that can be said about them is that they are clueless.  I despair that so many of them are on the take from big business.  I despair that vested interests are so rife and make me feel so helpless. When the day comes that I have to get the software that runs on my computer approved by the Disney Corporation I shall turn it in.   I shall bury my computer in a hole in the ground and go do something else instead.   http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000316.html RIAA and the 1st Thu, 22 Aug 2002 08:39:59 +0100 <A href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/26778.html">RIAA suspends DMCA lawsuit as listen4ever ducks</A>. Tanks back to fringes of ISPs' lawns [<A href="http://www.theregister.co.uk">The Register</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » There is something that I don't understand about this lawsuit (and let's be honest I know *nothing* about law, US or otherwise). Doesn't it fail on 1st ammendment grounds? How is it different to the libraries & internet filtering arguments? I guess the point for me is: why does the fact that the RIAA cannot persue the site authors by conventional means to remove the copyright material give them the right to ask for the site to be blocked? Can someone explain it?</BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000421.html Licensing: My brain hurts Thu, 29 Aug 2002 14:28:28 +0100 Here's something I don't understand: <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> My rights as the author and copyright holder of a piece of software I have written.</BLOCKQUOTE> I just don't understand them.  And, hence, I do not understand what I may or may not be giving away.  Example: If I publish a program under the GPL am I still the owner of the software?  In what sense? I've had conflicting opinions about the merits of going open source for my liveTopics program.  Before I make a final decision I want to really understand what I am doing either way and what I am, potentially, giving up. Example scenario: <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> liveTopics 1.0 is published as an open source program under the GPL.   For whatever reason though the project does not thrive.  In the mean time I see commercial possibilities for the project with further significant development effort.  I create version 2.0 of liveTopics. Am I bound by my own license to release it under the GPL?  Or do I have the right, as the owner, to decide I want to use a different license?</BLOCKQUOTE> I'd really love someone to help me answer these kind of questions, it's frazzling my brain trying to understand this stuff. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000475.html Copyright expiry can work Fri, 30 Aug 2002 11:01:14 +0100 <A href="http://scriptingnews.userland.com/moresSource">Dave Winer on releasing MORE's source</A>. (SOURCE:<A href="http://www.scripting.com/">Scripting News</A>)-OK, this makes sense now. I agree the system wouldn't work. Thanks Dave! <QUOTE> Maybe this simplified story will shed some light on the realities of software development. Had we been forced to release the source, I don't think we could have sold our investors on taking a chance on us, or realized the great return we got from the Symantec deal, and gone on to develop more software. The system you describe just wouldn't work, you wouldn't get any of it. Basically, I would love it if the source for MORE were released. I think it would be a humantarian contribution of the first order, but it's not mine to make. </QUOTE>[<A href="http://www.rolandTanglao.com/">Roland Tanglao's Weblog</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » Okay I wasn't going to jump in on this but I think Dave may have misunderstood Lessig's proposal.  I think 10 year copyright expiry could work. This is what I understand from <A href="http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/archives/cooper.html">Larry Lessig's</A> proposal about copyright expiry after 10 years: <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> The source code would be de-escrowed after 10 years.  But only the source code whose copyright has expired.  By publishing a new version (e.g. Version 2) of the software you establish a new copyright checkpoint.  Your version 2 doesn't get de-escrowed for 10 more years after it is released.</BLOCKQUOTE> So here are my reasons: <OL dir=ltr> <LI> <DIV>I do not think that the possession of a 10 year old version of the software is going to put you in a competitve position against the holder of the latest & greatest source code.  It would be like trying to market Windows 3.0 against Windows XP.</DIV></LI> <LI> <DIV>If investors had the choice between a company who kept the source code proprietary forever and one who had to publish after 10 years then I agree, they would pick the former.  But this will be a level playing field.  Everyone will have to publish their source code after 10 years.  It won't be an issue.</DIV></LI></OL> Of course maybe I've misunderstood Lessig..?</BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000478.html Fight expansion of copyright law Mon, 09 Sep 2002 21:19:37 +0100 <A href="http://news.com.com/2100-1023-956637.html?tag=fd_top">University to challenge copyright laws - Tech News - CNET.com</A>. Quote: "Duke University's law school has received an anonymous $1 million gift to fund advocacy and research aimed at curtailing the recent expansion of copyright law." [<A href="http://instructionalTechnology.editthispage.com/">Serious Instructional Technology</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » Way to go anonymous donor!!!</BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000521.html A solution to big media Tue, 26 Nov 2002 11:45:12 +0000 What happens when you blog a Fox executive? Blox <A href="http://www.way.nu/archives/000493.html#000493">Jonathan Peterson deconstructs the comments of Fox CEO Peter Chernin</A> in a Comdex keynote. Great stuff. Thanks for the link to <A href="http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/">David Weinberger</A>, who <A href="http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/000891.html">adds his own astute comments</A>. It all comes down to the notion that programming is scarce or, at least, needs to retain the appearance of scarcity to sustain its value. In fact, if you make connections and let value flow, the investment in programming made today can be much more profitable than it is in the broadcast model. [<A href="http://www.ratcliffe.com/bizblog/">RatcliffeBlog: Business, Technology & Investing</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » Folks the solution is simple: <UL> <LI>Stop watching TV.</LI> <LI>Stop going to the Movies.</LI> <LI>Don't buy Music, Videos, Games, Books or Magazines.</LI> <LI>Don't by a Tivo, DVD player, stereo, WEGA tv, PlayStation</LI></UL> In a couple of years all the media-related companies (and their dependents) will be bankrupt.  It might teach these guys that they need to treat us with a little respect if they want to survive. We won't do it of course...</BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000856.html RIAA has it's head in the sand Wed, 20 Aug 2003 11:59:34 +0100 <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <A href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/32420.html">RIAA pledges not to target casual file sharers</A>. Just think of the outcry if it did [<A href="http://www.theregister.co.uk">The Register</A>]</BLOCKQUOTE> I particularly liked this quote from a senior executive with a UK record label: <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> ...illegal online file sharing amounts to no more than a fraction of the total copyright infringement going on. The real issue, he said, is pirate CDs and DVDs from territories with no copyright laws, or law enforcement agencies unwilling to police them. "Going after file-sharing allows them to ignore the real problem," he said.</BLOCKQUOTE>   http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001570.html The only weapon we have left Wed, 08 Oct 2003 11:52:04 +0100 <div style="margin-left: 40px;"><a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/33270.html">Anti-RIAA group calls for CD boycott</a>. Halloween Raves to feature only shared songs [<a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk">The Register</a>] </div> So the vested interests have managed to bring us to heel.  The European Copyright Directive has now been incorporated into British law.  They say they it won't be used to attack P2P file sharers and individuals but, as the article says, <div style="margin-left: 40px;">He concluded: "There is nothing to suggest that prosecutors will want to use this law to cut the use of file-sharing services it's much more likely that any action in future will be taken under civil laws. But if the law is not intended to be used against individuals' non-commercial activities on the internet, why does it exist?" </div> I guess I'm pretty disgusted with how it is so easy for big companies to twist the legal system so that people who rip them off get huge fines and prison sentences but they themselves are never held accountable for stealing from pension funds or cheating the markets. This is going to be really hard for me.  I love music.  In my impoverished state it is the one thing I can still justify buying from time-to-time.  But boycotting seems to be the only weapon left to the individual. If these corporations are going to attack me, even indirectly, then by god I am going to attack them back. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001654.html Licensed to aggregate Sat, 07 Feb 2004 23:41:47 +0000 I have been encouraged to think about how copyright content works with RSS. For example I publish my weblog under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons</a> license however you couldn't tell that from my <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/rss.xml">RSS feed</a>. Does that mean that my feed is not under a CC license? I don't, but I guess that it's confusing at best. What should an application reading my feed and not my blog do? What rules should it apply? I didn't find any solutions to this question searching Google just now so I've started thinking of one myself. Obviously if anyone knows of solution already in use I'd be grateful to hear about it. My first attempt at a solution is to propose a simple new RSS 2.0 extension for Licensing. This extension would add just one new element <code><license></code> which can be applied at both <code><channel></code> and <code><item></code> level. Using such a mechanism a license can be applied to the feed and overriden for specific items if required (although this would require more control in the editing environment). For example one might apply a <a href="http://www.primarilypublicdomain.org/">Primarily Public Domain</a> license to their feed, but override this on a specific item for which they wished to retain the copyright. The next question is what the content of such an element should be. Creative commons licenses have a useful URL which it would be helpful to include. Other (or future) types of license may also have a similar arrangement. Copyright notices on the other hand do not generally have an addressable resource. Therefore I propose the use of an optional <code>src</code> attribute which can point at any addressable resource related to the license. Since copyright is (as far as I understand it) a binary concept I propose another attribute, <code>copyright</code> which has a default value of <code>true</code>. To remove the copyright the attribute should be specified with a value of <code>false</code>. The content of the element then can be an arbitrary string. A copyright notice in the case of a copyright work, or some other useful descriptive string. Some examples: <ul><li><code><license>Copyright (c) 2004 Matt Mower</license></code></li> <li><code><license copyright="false" src="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0">Creative Commons - By Attribution, Non-Commerical, No Derivative works</license></code></li> </ul> Any takers? http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001854.html Licensed to aggregate (pt #2) Tue, 10 Feb 2004 08:00:08 +0000 I have received a couple of comments to my earlier <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/2004/02/08.html#a1315">piece</a> about licensing & RSS. Among others Phil Ringnalda pointed me at the <a href="http://backend.userland.com/creativeCommonsRssModule">Creative Commons RSS Module</a> authored by <a href="http://www.scripting.com/">Dave Winer</a> in Dec 2002. The CC module is pretty much the same solution as I was proposing in that it seems to be a start in the right direction. However neither it, nor my own suggestion, answer all the questions in a way I can appreciate (e.g. as Phil points out, what is covered by the license: text only? images? etc...), so i'm going to keep chipping at this. A commentor, <a href="http://www.lulop.com/">Lorenzo</a>, has suggested that <blockquote>Copyright is a "state" and licensing is an "action" made possible by the state.</blockquote>I kind of disagree with this statement but mainly on terminological grounds. I hope we can cut through that by agreeing that the central point is rights. Who has them? What uses do they permit? It seems to me that a Copyright statement reserves all rights relating to making copies (& derivative works) to the author who can then make exceptions on a case-by-case basis. As in the case where an author grants their publisher the right to make copies for sale. Hence an RSS feed with a copyright notice shouldn't be read (copied) unless you consider the act of offering feed to be an implicit agreement by the author to do so. Of course from a software perspective implicit rights can be problematic, especially when they are not immutable or well understood. For an RSS feed with a copyright statement what rights are actually on offer? People commonly republish content from posts they have aggregated either whole or in part. How do they know they have the right to do so? Then you have some interesting anomalies when software gets in the way. For example, my <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/">weblog</a> has a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons</a> <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0">license</a>, yet my <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/rss.xml">feed</a> is Copyright. I guess Radio is automatically adding the copyright notice, I don't know how to make it stop. What am I telling you? Alternatively, and I guess this may be common, Phil Ringnalda's blog doesn't have any kind of license at all, neither does his feed. Can I assume Phil intends all his material to be public domain? If i'm not clear that this is the intension how can my software be? Creative Commons offer a range of licenses which offer the right to copy, or make derivative works, with certain restrictions such as share alike and non commercial use only. Primarily Public Domain takes this a step further in granting unlimited rights with exceptions being, if you'll excuse the pun, the exception. Maybe it's my developer "tunnel vision" at work but this looks very similar to the common model of permissions adopted in software everywhere: <ul> <li>include * except A, B, C,...</li> <li>exclude * except R, S, T,...</li> </ul> where A, B, etc.. are not users or hosts but specific actions, by identified individuals, in specific circumstances. For most personal news aggregators I guess none of this matters much. If someone publishes a feed, and you're just reading it, then whats the harm? Unless of course you weren't supposed to have the URL to the feed. But that's a different issue. However for aggregators like <a href="http://w4.evectors.it/">K-Collector</a> and users who are reposting content it's a different matter. For example K-Collector doesn't mess with the content of posts, but it does republish them in a new context. If K-Collector has a better Google page rank than the author then we even begin to suck traffic away from them based upon their own material! (To be clear I am only talking about the public K-Collector portal <a href="http://w4.evectors.it/">W4</a>. This is an untypical use of <a href="http://www.evectors.com/itkcollector/">K-Collector</a> which is designed for use within organisations. But the point still stands. And what about <a href="http://www.feedster.com/">Feedster</a>?) As ambitious, semi-automated, software like K-Collector become more common then a reasonable, dependable, system of rights is going to be required. To my way of thinking the <a href="http://backend.userland.com/creativeCommonsRssModule">Creative Commons RSS Module</a>, whilst a start in the right direction, addresses a necessary, but not sufficient, subset of the goals. What do we do to take it further? http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001863.html Licensed to aggregate (pt #3) Tue, 10 Feb 2004 11:10:14 +0000 Just musing out loud... The HTTP protocol specifies headers which clients can supply in a request to control what a server can return to them. One in particular is the accept header. Which looks something like: <blockquote>accept:text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,image/jpeg,image/gif;q=0.2,*/*;q=0.1</blockquote> so there is already a simple model available for delineating content types. I am thinking of something along the lines of: <ul> <li><rights apply="*" scope="http://matt.blogs.it/*" grant="read" copyright="Copyright 2004 Matt Mower"/> <li><rights apply="text/xml,application/xml" scope="http://matt.blogs.it/*" grant="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/nd-nc/1.0/"/></li> <li><rights apply="image/gif,image/jpeg" scope="http://matt.blogs.it/images/*" grant="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/1.0/"/></li> </ul> I'm not sure whether this is something that should be embedded in an RSS feed or referenced from another location (since it is potentially applicable to the blog as well). Other questions are: <ol><li>Should it be extended to handle specific identifiable resources?</li> <li>To whom are these rights granted?</li> <li>Do we have the right set of rights to be granted? (cf my use of read above.)</li> <li>Is the creative commons URL per scheme approach the right one?</li> <li>Can we come up with a similar scheme for copyright & public domain?</li></ol> It occurs to me that it might be possible to link a scheme like this to <a href="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/">FOAF</a> and use a service like <a href="http://peopleaggregator.com/">PeopleAggregator</a> to create the publishing/sharing relationships. This moves much closer to Ted Nelsons Transclusion publishing concept. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001872.html Lessig++ RIAA-- Free culture = more creativity Tue, 25 May 2004 08:36:57 +0100 <blockquote><a href="http://chocnvodka.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2004/5/24/75514.html">Something for Nothing in fifteen words</a>. For the terminally short of attention out there, here's my <a href="http://chocnvodka.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2004/5/24/75489.html">Free Culture audiobook essay</a> in 15 words: Lessig++ RIAA-- Free culture = more creativity New publishing models Download, read, buy = sales up Discuss! [<a href="http://chocnvodka.blogware.com/blog">Chocolate and Vodka</a>] </blockquote> Suws been doing a lot of thinking about copyright, free culture, and the impact of releasing your content under different licenses so that others may build derivative works.  The <a href="http://chocnvodka.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2004/5/24/75489.html">full essay</a> makes for interesting reading. Something I shall be watching is how this model works as it evolves and how it works in general.  So far we are talking about a very few cases and the financials are not well understood.  As an author whose primary motivation is not financial I can see how this makes a lot of sense.  But what if you really do want the money? Maybe I should read Free Culture ;-) http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002264.html