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Michael Geist – Music and the Market

I am increasingly seeing copyright-related stories out of Canada based on the same sources (the Canadian Music Industry) that strongly imply the same thing. Music sales are down because peer to peer downloading is up; therefore, Canada needs strong copyright laws to stop this trend. We should know that correlation does not necessitate causation when looking at two factors, and in this article Michael Geist dives deeper into the Canadian music market for explanations about why these arguments seem hollow.

CSPD Comics

A comic about copyright and how it affects people, through the lens of a documentary filmmaker.

EFF: Sony BMG Settlement Info

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is encouraging people to claim their due from Sony/BMG, which was due to the security nightmare caused by their overreaching copyright protection mechanisms.

Speaking of settlements, I recently ran into a reminder of an older CD settlement related to charges of price-fixing. As part of that settlement, the industry promised to give libraries and other institutions CDs to promote musical programs and activities, and made very grand statements about how they would not be providing overstocks or titles that you would want to throw away. That, apparently, was not at all honest.

My mother is the Coordinator for Technology Integration at Region One in the state of Texas, which serves all of south Texas’s school districts. Like the other stories I linked above, they are distributing multiple copies of the same CDs, some very obscure, some marked for promotional use only, and so on. There were so many of the same ones, so little interest in some of these CDS, that now they are going to have to destroy the remainder of what they received. They couldn’t get anyone to take them.

Scrivener’s Error – Hasn’t Anyone Ever Heard of First Sale?

Scrivener’s Error has some strong criticism for the bill as written, views the bill as an attempt to undermine the first-sale doctrine, and notes several other problems. I was not aware that the bill was a stealth bill, heading to the Committee on Energy and Commerce rather than the Committee on Judiciary, the typical home of copyright legislation. The blog author also recognizes that the bill seems to contradict the Audio Home Recording Act in several ways, particularly the prohibition on certain infringement actions.

The first sale doctrine implications are troubling, and I’m glad he pointed them out. For those of you unfamiliar with the first sale doctrine, that is the portion of copyright law that allows activities like selling, giving away, burning, etc. legitimately acquired copies of materials without infringing copyright. It also allows things like DVD rentals, and oh, say, libraries lending books. It is an important part of copyright law.

There have been several challenges to the first sale doctrine when dealing with digital materials. The U.S. Copyright Office generally tends not to discount first sale applying to digital objects, although this is a debated subject. I’ll write more about this at another time, but the different views usually break down from “digital objects should be treated the same as physical objects” to “transferring digital objects is infringement because you always make a copy when you try to transfer,” with various arguments in-between. Some libraries do attempt to lend digital materials, with varying degrees of success (note that in the linked example, they are actually lending a physical object). Of course, companies generally attempt to direct the usage of digital copies by DRM and complex licensing, which attempts to take first sale out of the picture altogether.

And of course, once again, this is an attempt to use legislation to direct the development of technology in such a way that could potentially harm the public.

From a Boing Boing story noting that the US House of Representatives has introduced a mandatory radio-crippling law.

There are serveral disturbing parts of the proposed law, dubbed the Audio Broadcast Flag Licensing Act of 2006. The relatively short full text of the bill can be found on Thomas at the Library of Congress.

One of the most problematic portions of the bill would prohibit “unauthorized copying and redistribution” of digital radio. The bill itself has language that MIGHT allow exemptions such as fair use or the myriad other exemptions, but it isn’t clear, and the bill relegates these uses to the “custormary use of broadcast content by consumers.” I find the terms customary use and consumers disingenuous. “Customary use” smacks of the problematic “historical use” that some content publishing industries are advocating as a replacement for fair use. Historic/Customary use is not sufficient to protect the public interest in copyrighted material. “Consumers” completely ignores members of the public who are not necessarily what a market would consider consumers- like, say, instructors teaching in the classroom, for one example.

Boing Boing: US copyright head: world “totally rejects” webcasting restrictions

Very interesting article about the controversial “webcasting provision” of the new proposed WIPO broadcasters’ treaty. The treaty would very much broaden strong copyright protection by adding yet another complex layer on top of copyright law- giving webcasters rights that they do not (and should not) have at this point in time. It makes fair uses more difficult for the public, by adding additional liability to people making fair uses of copyrighted work. It would give casters more authority than the copyright holders in many cases, which I would think should be objectionable by copyright holders as well as the public.

Joining in the discussion about Google and Libraries at Madisonian.net.

Here’s the text of my comment. To summarize, I like Google, I like libraries, I use them both, and they’re not mutually exclusive. I think people should be very wary of the idea that Google is a replacement for libraries instead of another avenue to use in information seeking.
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Again- I’m not a librarian, but I am pro-librarian. To answer your last question, I don’t think so.

I don’t believe that you need to stop Google to save librarians, because I don’t believe that Google serves as a replacement for libraries. I believe that even if all information in the world was available digitally, there would still be a place for librarians. I’m not anti-Google, either- I use Google constantly. I also use libraries, though. ^_^ In my day to day activities, I use Google more than the library. Really, it depends on what I’m doing.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted this as a comment on another blog.

Followed the link from Sivacracy. I don’t 100% agree with everything Siva writes, but I still think he’d be a good guy to go to lunch with. 😛 He really does know a LOT of librarians and talks to them regularly. He isn’t particularly friendly with the publisher perspective, either, though.

Personally, I’m torn on the subject of Google’s digitization project. I’m not a librarian, but I’ve got my MLIS, I work at a library school, and I’m a doctoral student there as well (studying, among other things, copyright and its effects on the missions of cultural institutions). I’m also one of the ALA copyright scholars. I can say with complete certainty that the librarians that are members of the copyright scholar group and ALA’s own copyright committee, representing librarians from around the country, are not completely behind Google’s actions in this case. We’ve been pretty divided, actually. In that setting, I actually usually defend Google in that I believe their use should be fair- but I also think that there are downsides to the Google project as well. I’m glad that Siva at the very least brings some of these issues to our attention. I don’t completely agree with his fair use analysis, although I am familiar with the Tasini, MP3.com, and Arriba cases.

From a copyright perspective, I think it would be great if Google’s use was considered fair use. I agree with part of your statement. Digitiziation is not an either/or proposition. If Google’s use is fair- well, that would just make it all the easier for other groups, including libraries, to take similar actions. Just because Google is doing it does not mean that libraries, or other interested parties, can’t also digitize. Google does have the resources to take action now, and most libraries certainly do not, but I don’t think that immediacy is necessarily a positive thing in this particular situation. It kind of depends on the end result, doesn’t it? Digitization for digitization’s sake isn’t necessarily good.

That being said, I don’t think that what Google is doing is not necessarily good for libraries and information users. In the short term, I think it is. I agree that visibility is a good thing; my gut reaction to the project, when I first heard about Google Print a couple of years ago, was very positive. I think the ability to keyword search for particular books is great. I started having my doubts when I read the contract that Google worked out with the universities. I don’t know that it’s particularly good for users in those systems. I also think that “the choice is ‘Google digitizes everything’ or ‘libraries digitize less than 1%'” is just as much a false dichotomy as Google digitizes everything or libraries digitize everything. There are many ways that libraries or other institutions can participate, and there are better ways for Google or other for-profit institutions and libraries to work together. The contracts could be much better for the university libraries than the existing one with Google, I think. The libraries can’t do some things that would really make this project worthwhile, I believe, due to Google’s control of the digitized forms. I find this ironic, given that libraries that meet copyright law requirements actually do have more leeway to work with copyrighted materials than Google does.

The benefits I see in this project are the general benefits of digitization- additional gains of use such as searching and indexing, and the potential of increased access to material. I agree with Cory Doctorow that it would be in the publisher’s best interest to work with Google. I don’t necessarily know that it’s in the users’ overall best interest. DRM and proprietary formats are problematic. I don’t automatically believe that big corporations are a bad thing, but I do believe that big corporations do not necessarily have the public’s best interests paramount. Nor do all libraries, either, but most public libraries do tend to have missions and mandates that reflect the public interest, while corporations tend not to. (I hope to be studying the missions and laws related to cultural institutions more when I start my dissertation.) When serving the public interest might harm a corporation financially, they may be very well obligated to act against the public interest. Libraries, museums, and archives often have legal mandates to act for the public, and are I think the public’s best advocates in these situations over the long term. On a somewhat related note, I don’t know how Google’s cataloging is- and I do not believe that keyword searches are a replacement for good cataloging, which is increasingly a view that I disturbingly find cropping up.

I read Sivacracy and Madisonian.net pretty regularly. I don’t particularly agree with either one about this particular case all of the time, but I really respect what they have to say. I’ve been quoted on both of them briefly (“not a librarian after all” from Sivacracy, and Madisonian’s misunderstanding of my argument about making a fair use argument rather than a library exemption argument, which was my fault). The Google issue has been very interesting- it’s the first time that people I read and agree with regularly actually disagree with one another in some pretty strong terms.(On a complete side note, if you’re looking for a blog representing what I think is the author’s perspective, Scrivener’s Error is also an excellent one!) I’m glad that they’re engaged in the conversations that they are engaged in, though.

Geez. So overall, I think Google’s use should be fair, but that libraries still have a responsibility to digitize as well, and are probably better stewards of information than Google is.

Wow, this got long, sorry!

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Original message on Not Liz.

Rockstar legal warriors squash online installation | The Daily Page

Again, games and copyright cross paths and the resulting crash isn’t pretty. GamePolitics linked to this article about Rockstar’s use of a DMCA Cease and Desist notice to take down a student’s site. The site used material from the Warriors in a manner that was critical to their games (and video games in general, really). I find the use of the DMCA particularly unappealing in this case. I don’t particularly care for the GTA series- not that I haven’t played any of them, but they’re just not my thing. Despite that, I would defend the game maker’s own free speech and expression rights. I find their (mis)use of copyright to stifle social commentary in this situation hypocritical.

…is the name of the first class I’m taking as a doctoral student. There are several issues here, all of them worth writing about here or in a “real” publication. ^_^; It’s keeping me busy, particularly examing the software issues associated with automating crawling, saving, and archiving websites and having to worry about archival standards of authenticity. (Future subjects: how digital archives and records management differ, authenticity and integrity of electronic archives, determining the authenticity of an archived dynamic web site, intellectual property issues in absolutely everything).

Copyright issues are also keeping me busy. I may address a conference in South Texas in May. I need to work on ALA’s library copyright website. I’ll be addressing a few classes here this semester. There are some very interesting copyright issues that I’ll need to look at right away. The iSchool is currently working on a project for the Harry Ransom Center, currently in possession of some 1950s interviews of some very famous people by another famous person. I don’t know how much I can write about this publicly yet, so I’ll hold off. However, the copyright implications are really fascinating. There are several contracts involved, some of them pre-Internet. There are contractual materials that have been lost in various disasters. The original company that owned the interviews does not exist. The assumed owner has licensed HRC to do various things with the records. People at our school will be digitizing the materials, creating trascripts and digitizing already created transcripts, and creating derivative works that allow searching, indexing, and so on of the transcript+video.And then the plan is to put at least some of these materials online… staggering. ^_^

In other news, the fact that “libraries” and “archives” are not legally defined in US Law comes up so often that the Section 508 Group formed by the Library of Congress to address the problems in 508 will be having roundtable discussions involving the issue, as well as a variety of subjects involving digital copyright.