I included the copyright notice because it was too funny to pass up.Turning copyright on its head
Copyright laws were originally intended to promote learning by allowing books to be duplicated. Their more restrictive interpretation is a modern one
Rory McGreal
Freelance
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Many people believe that if something is repeated on television and at the movies by famous or "respected" people then it must be true, whereas the opinions of legitimate researchers and critics do not share the same degree of trust among the "common people."
Because the Bible is well respected as a moral guide, unscrupulous vendors misuse it to their advantage. They distort the meaning of words and omit uncomfortable truths to suit their case and mislead the public on the facts.
Snake oil salesmen have been latching onto the Bible and other respected symbols for years in order to pitch their products or point of view.
Now the motion picture and recording industries are jumping on the distortion bandwagon. They are claiming that downloading movies and songs is "stealing." They do so because this emotes the Bible and one of the 10 Commandments.
But are you stealing when you download software, a movie or song? According to different dictionaries, stealing requires that an object must be taken away from another. As nothing is taken away from the owner when one copies a song or movie, then downloading cannot be construed as stealing.
In fact, the courts have upheld this. The correct term for someone who illegally downloads a song or movie is "infringer." Infringement may or may not be ethically questionable. What is ethically questionable is the use of the term "stealing" by the vendors.
Most people today believe that copyright was instituted to protect the rights of the author.
Factually and historically in the British Common Law countries like Canada and the United States, copyright was instituted to promote learning. The first copyright law, the Statute of Queen Anne, 1710, was entitled "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning."
U.S. copyright law is based on this act "to promote the progress of science and useful arts." In fact, these first copyright laws were introduced to limit, and not to protect, the rights of the content owners. The copyright was initiated specifically to promote learning by removing the perpetual rights of the printers, transferring the rights to the authors and imposing a reasonable time limit on their privilege.
In Ireland in the sixth century, King Diarmait made the earliest known judgment restricting copying. "To every cow its calf, to every book its copy." Columcille (St. Columba) responded to this adverse judgment with force and 3,000 men lay dead in an Irish field, fighting for the saint's right to copy. (Despite this law, the Irish monks continued copying books, spread out from Scotland and brought the enlightenment to Europe.)
But the restrictive law remained. Copying without royal permission was forbidden.
In 17th-century England, the printers controlled everything that was published, under the watchful eyes of the king and the church. When the Catholics were in control, protestant literature was not published and when the protestants achieved ascendancy, Catholic works became proscribed. With the Statute of Ste. Anne, these restrictions were overcome as the right to copy was recognized as essential for the dissemination of knowledge. The public domain or the right of everyone, and specifically educators, to copy was created. Universities were explicitly mentioned as guardians of this public knowledge.
The public domain became effective after 14 years of a copyright to be held by the author.
Authors and the other copyright owners even today do not own their creative work. They only own the copyright and only for a limited time. The people own the creative works (or intellectual property as it is now unfortunately known as).
Copyright is a privilege extended to the vendors by the people because they recognize that creative work is valuable for the cultural and intellectual life of society.
Today, educators are asking for an exemption so that teachers can make effective use of copyrighted materials in their classrooms or online as part of fair dealing.
The vendors have effectively morphed copyright from its original emphasis on learning with an exception for vendors to the situation today where the emphasis is on the vendors, with an exception for educators.
Because of extensions of copyright control. The public domain has been extended to 50 years after the author's death and with the new legislation soon to be extended to 70 years. And, there is no reason to believe that when the present term expires that it won't be extended further to a term of "forever less-a-day," as one U.S. representative in Congress put it.
Nothing has come onto the public domain in Canada since the 1920s. Millions of creative works (books, movies, songs etc.) have been denied to the public. Taking these works away from the public could be defined as "stealing."
The vendors, especially the big U.S. conglomerates, are forcing their views of copyright onto the rest of the world. The U.S. receives more than half of the world's total money spent on copyright licences and royalties. Stronger copyright protection is a core element of its trade strategy.
To protect their industry, they are creating a copyright "coalition of the willing." The new Canadian legislation is to be a reflection of this, even though Canada is like most other countries in the world -- a net importer of copyrighted works.
Vendors refer to all people who copy their works as "pirates." However, according to Peter Ludlow, a useful distinction would be that of "bootlegger." He defines a bootlegger as one who copies another's works for profit, whereas a pirate may be a student who copies a work for his or her own use or to show a friend.
I think that most people would agree that the bootlegger is a criminal, whereas the "pirate" may or may not be infringing on the owners' rights and may just be exercising fair dealing rights.
For example, according to Canadian law, recently reinforced by a Supreme Court decision, researchers have every right to copy materials for research purposes. Canadians can copy songs because of the levy on tapes, CDs and DVDs.
In fact, in biblical times and until quite recently, copyists were among the most respected people in society.
The concept of infringement was unknown to the people then. Copyists were the people who have kept our history and traditions alive.
The vendors never campaign for their own rights as sellers. They use the artists, writers, and authors because the public has some sympathy for them.
Nearly all marketable intellectual property today is not owned by the author or artist, but usually by multinational companies.
Most rock and roll groups who sign up with the record labels end up owing money to the record company.
The vendors are spending millions to distort words and use them to convince us that the values we hold -- like giving and sharing -- are in fact immoral and amount to stealing.
What is needed is balance in the law with a return to the first principles of copyright, namely, to promote learning while respecting the rights of the creators to control their works and profit from them for a reasonable time.
Or shall we continue to live in a world where sharing for learning is to be considered a crime?
Rory McGreal is the associate vice-president of research at Athabasca University
© The Edmonton Journal 2008
Now, I'm not sure about some of these arguments, but I was hoping you guys could help me figure out where they seem to be off.
Also: It's legal to copy music and videos and Canada because of the levy the CRIA lobbied the government to put in place? Hilarious.
