I just found out today that there will be a presentation and discussion, featuring Yaacov Iland, at the Waterloo Public Library Auditorium: One Laptop Per Child: Appropriate Technology?
This will take place tomorrow, March 26, 2008, from 7-8pm. Click the link above for details and to RSVP.
Tags: Canada, lectures, olpc, technology, yaacov ilandNext Thursday, The Center for Internet and Society at Stanford is presenting “Innovation Goes Public”, a talk by Bruce Perens on business models for open source software.
Sadly, jetting off to Stanford for a day to attend the presentation isn’t within my time or fiscal budget. I suspect that much of the presentation will focus on shifting from the sale of software to the sale of technical support. But, despite this, I also suspect the very basic concepts behind the shift in business models may be of use to other creators (visual artists, musicians/songwriters, writers, movie-makers, etc).
What is persistently annoying for me is my inability to see how visual artists can rethink their business models in this new environment where distribution is dramatically easier than before. Are we to rethink what influences the value of a work of art? What does influence the value of a work of art? Will multiple copies of a work still decrease its value in the current environment? Does that apply to all media?
Tags: art, business models, lectures, open source, stanford
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Yesterday, I attended the 2008 Grafstein Lecture in Communications at the University of Waterloo. This year’s presenter was Jessica Litman, on the topic of rethinking copyright.
The topic of rethinking copyright was exciting on its own. I have a great deal of respect for Litman’s work, so being able to attend the lecture was something I was looking forward to for several weeks.
Litman started the lecture with some background information, which was mostly “common knowledge” for anyone who has studied copyright and all of which was a precursor to the crux of her position. She reiterated the fact that many creators are trying to manage the changes in the way their work is distributed, accessed and copied with the new technologies available to us, and that the internet is putting some copyright owners out of business and creating opportunities for other copyright owners (primarily creators who wouldn’t have publishers under the old model of creation and distribution). She then reminded us that the costs of paper publishing, both historically and presently, require that much of the revenue go toward the publisher, who is an intermediary between the creator and the user.
Litman stressed the need for a reallocation of the priorities in copyright, with a focus on enhanced rights for readers of works. She reminded us that the dominant businesses in the creative industry are lobbying for change because the current copyright law does not work well for them. In particular, current US copyright law makes it very difficult to license digital copies of music.
Among the distribution problems is the one that creators often have little control over and income from their works. This, I believe, is a problem more common in creative works meant for mass distribution (e.g. literature, movies, software and music), rather than something like visual art where the work is meant to be unique and limited in its distribution.
A very interesting (and under-reported) point that Litman mentioned is that 4 years ago, the Supreme Court of Canada passed a judgement which states ““Research” must be given a large and liberal interpretation in order to ensure that users’ rights are not unduly constrained“. This decision, she felt, should be giving lobbyists for user rights adequate support for their cause.
One of her great observations is that the technology for distributing/copying/publishing is overlapping with the technology for reading/watching/listening. This is where the old concepts of how people interact with creative works shifts, because the technologies create temporary and permanent copies of copyrighted works.
The following are the three ongoing problems she listed as prime examples:
The question Litman posed to us is where do readers, listeners and viewers fall into copyright?
One of the problems she has with current discussions on user rights is that we are rolling all users of copyrighted materials into one category: both the corporate users (e.g. Disney) and the individual readers, listeners and viewers. Note that in the Q&A which followed the lecture, someone asked where Litman would place the new breed of users, which I’ll call the creators of user-generated content. Litman replied that she would draw the line between commercial and non-commercial use. Although I tried drawing that line in the past, I’m still not certain whether that’s the correct or most accurate distinction.
Litman stressed the need to use the distinction of “readers, listeners and viewers” rather than “consumers” (because of the inherit implication that money is involved) or “enjoyers” (because the work may not necessarily be enjoyed, per se). From this point, I’m just going to use “RLV” because I’m too lazy to type “readers, listeners and viewers” every time.
To drive home the need for us to rethink copyright via user rights, Litman argued that the RLVs interact with works and thereby complete the creators’ interests. While I find this notion somewhat romantic, I do agree that the creation and existence of works seems very hollow without anyone on the receiving end. Like having a conversation with yourself, creating a work without an audience is often unfulfilling for the creator.
Litman recognizes that it’s difficult for many people to think about user rights because that’s not normally how we think about copyright. The difficulty I have with thinking about user rights is not the resistance to it, but not knowing what exactly those rights ought to be and which ones are related primarily to copyright.
Personally, I found Litman’s comments about the relationship between the creator and the RLV to be a crucial concept which needs to be explored much more, both within and outside of the realm of copyright. At the Visual Arts Summit, there was discussion of needing to connect audiences with art, and I’m now wondering how much creators have been disconnected with the people for whom they are creating/the people who interact with their creations. Litman likened the trio of creators, publishers an RLVs to an ecosystem which depends on each other, and it was unspoken that there is an imbalance in the ecoystem.
A humorous and true insight from Litman was that while we all agree that there is an imbalance in the amount of power and control allotted to the creators, distributors and RLVs, the disagreement is who has the upper hand. Each side feels that they are being cheated by the other two, and each demands for their rights to be protected. But when their interests conflict, whose rights prevail?
Throughout the lecture, the dominant thought I had was that we need to start rethinking, not copyright, but the entire sphere of creative output and its support systems. To date, most of us have been treating the problems of copyright as the result of changes in technology. But I’m starting to think that we need to see the inadequacies of current copyright law as a symptom of a much greater phenomenon: the very rel change in the way works are created, distributed and read/listened/viewed. Perhaps we can’t come to any resolutions and keep discussing unrelated issues as copyright issues, not because they are unrelated, but because we are starting from the wrong place.
Tags: art, Canada, copyright, internet, ip, jessica litman, law, lectures, money, technology, user rights, visual arts summit Print This Post
The Centre for Innovation Law and Policy is already scheduling their lectures for 2008. Here are some upcoming lectures:
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In light of all the brouhaha over the copyright legislation, the Art & Technology lectures from the Columbia University School of Arts may prove to be very interesting.
Thanks to CARFAC Sask for the link!
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Throughout the lecture, I was hurriedly making notes as I tried to absorb and process the information being thrown at me. Some of the questions I jotted down were:
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In the lecture, Professor Mazeh had pointed out that under UK law, a musical, dramatic or literary work automatically becomes copyrighted if it is fixed by anyone. One of the participants asked what happens if the author does not want their work to fall under the jurisdiction of copyright law. Although Professor Mazeh replied that people are free to waive or hold their copyright, I wonder how someone would know to waive their copyright if they didn’t know that it was protected by copyright in the first place.
During the discussion, several people challenged the last enhancement. One of the challenges I found to have most impact on artists was whether this accessibility would negatively impact the value of the work. I thought instantly of Matthew Barney, whose work The Cremaster Cycle is available to the public only through cinemas or to collectors who have half a million dollars for one of the limited edition DVDs of one of the five portions of the cycle (although bootleg copies exist, and occasionally make an appearance online, they have been quickly shut down; also, a portion of Cremaster 3 is available on DVD). To these challenges, Professor Mazeh responded that he didn’t care how the work was accessible—for example, the work could be publicly accessible in the form of a book for sale. I (and, from the questions being posed, others) wanted more discussion of the meaning of “publicly accessible”. The issue of accessibility is a topic unto itself, and I personally don’t think that any works would be protected by copyright law if public accessibility were a requirement because there are too many barriers to total accessibility.
During the discussion, many other questions were brought to light by the proposed justifications, proposed enhancements and the topic overall:
There was also the question of whether Professor Mazeh was actually proposing, through the enhancements, a requirement of registration. In the current Canadian copyright system, there is no requirement for registration but it is recommended by the Copyright Board of Canada. However, the registration process does not require (and actually prohibits) a copy of the work to be included in the registration. In a workshop on copyright I attended earlier this year, hosted by CARFAC Ontario, all of the artists in the workshop were surprised and concerned by the fact that the registration of copyright is not only relatively expensive, but doesn’t require any information about the work which can be used to identify it (except, perhaps, the title).
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Yesterday, Professor Yoav Mazeh hosted a workshop which asked “should works of copyright be fixed in tangible form?“. His lecture was followed by the most lively discussions I’ve experienced at the workshops I have attended so far. Professor Mazeh began with asking why, if copyright is the protection of intellectual property, the work must be fixed. He noted that the 1911 UK Copyright Act (Ss 35(1)) had a definition of dramatic work which included the requirement of fixation, which was expanded in the UK CDPA in 1988 (Ss 3(5)) to literary and musical work also (but did not include artistic works). Canada’s current Copyright Act (S 3(2)) is similar to the 1911 UK Copyright Act, having the fixation requirement explicitly applying only to dramatic works.
He proposed the following as the justifications for the fixation requirement:
-evidentiary justification
-3rd parties’ certainty (so 3rd parties are able to determine whether they have infringed upon someone’s copyright)
-the enrichment of society
-[to address the challenge of the] author’s subjective perspective of the work
Interestingly, he noted that there is only the requirement that works have been fixed, and there is no known requirement that the works must be fixed at the time of litigation. Copyright laws also have different requirements for who fixed the work, and whether permission was granted to the fixer by the author. UK law (Ss 3(3)) indicates that it is immaterial whether the work is recorded by or with the permission of the author. US law (S 101) indicates that copyright protection only exists if the work was fixed by the author or with the author’s permission. Canadian law is silent to the matter, and there was actually quite a bit of discussion of whether it follows UK or US law in that respect (conclusion: it is most likely similar to UK law, but this matter was unresolved within the time-frame of the workshop).
These different requirements pose challenges because:
-if the author is unaware that the fixation was made (e.g. by a fan at a concert), and is possibly inaccessible to the author and to others, his proposed justifications are negated; and
-if the author is the only one who has fixed the work, the work could be inaccessible to others and most of his proposed justification are negated.
Some “grey area” art which enters into the fixation issue are ice/sand sculptures and face painting, which are temporary artwork which exists long enough for them to be copied (or fixed in another form). Although these works are fixed at some point in time, they are not fixed with any permanence…and therefore negates most of his proposed justifications to the fixation requirement.
Professor Mazeh also noted the problem that although there is a fixation requirement, there is no requirement for there to be public access to the work, negating the justifications he had proposed.
To these problems, he proposed the following enhancements to the fixation requirement:
-fixation [to be done] by [the] author
-fixation [must be] retained
-fixation [must be stored in a] publicly accessible depository
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I was eager to attend today’s lecture/workshop with Margaret Jane Radin because I have, for some time now, wondered whether it is legal for contracts and agreements to be enforced unilaterally (my favourite response to this can be found at the bottom of this website). Although Radin didn’t address that specific question, her lecture provided me with much background information for me to get a better understanding of the issue.
The basis for her lecture was not particularly about digitalized contracts (which for me meant the existence of contracts primarily in digital format, such as on a website), but exploring the possibility of a digital handshake between two digital entities.
Radin walked us through the different types of agreements and how the public has been moved through one to another, including End User Rights, Terms of Service, and End User Agreements. There was also quite a bit of discussion on the fact that the concept of an agreement has changed—something which concerned her and likewise concerns me. Historically, people entered into contractual agreements voluntarily, but (and I’m paraphrasing and adding my own perspective here) as business became more corporate and more private, these contractual agreements became less voluntary. For the change in agreement, Radin focused primarily on the fact that the agreement is now no longer the link between two persons but between a person and the digital object, whether that be something as physical as a cell phone or as intangible as software.
She was very excited about the prospect of contracts having the possibility of being modular now that contracts are so easily available in digital format (and therefore much more accessible than in the past). She spent a bit of time talking about how contracts can now be simultaneously more standardized and more customized because of this possibility of modularity. Not only can companies modularize their own contracts, but they can also appropriate portions of other companies’ contracts into their own. This made me wonder (perhaps dangerously so) whether contracts themselves qualify for copyright protection under current copyright law.
One thing I noticed is that both Radin and Litman spoke of the “holes” in copyright law as something intentional and good. This is certainly not the perspective of many groups (e.g. the RIAA) although, as Radin pointed out, the copyright acts we have now were written by the primary industry stakeholders in copyright.
Tags: contracts, eua, law, lectures, margaret jane radin, tos Print This Post
On October 16th, I attended Jessica Litman’s lecture on Copyright Liberties and the “Trumpet Problem”. The lecture was very exciting for me, because I recently finished reading her book Digital Copyright, which I loved. At the lecture, I was relieved that she knows her material well and is not only enthusiastic about it but also current. It has been a few years since I’ve attended a lecture, and many of my professors at the time were dull enough to drive me to the Independent Studies program at UWaterloo.
She touched briefly on having to distinguish the difference between distribution and making available, which I personally find to be two different but related concepts which the music and movie industries are all too eager to call one and the same.
Litman asked us, indirectly, to look more at the reason for copyright, rather than the forms and details of existing and past copyright laws. From her overview of the history of copyright law, it was obvious that the advancement of technology was moving much too quickly for the establishment of law, and I suspect that gap is increasing now that self-publishing of not merely artistic works but also technological works becomes easier.
For me, what was perhaps most interesting was a little tidbit she dropped: the RIAA doesn’t want an “ipod levy” because they don’t want to legalize personal copying. Hmm.
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