Tag: copyright review

Orphan Works Rumor Not Helpful

Okay.  A bunch of my artists rights friends and colleagues need to take a breath, because some of you are doing exactly the kind of stuff we hate when the tech industry exaggerates or fabricates negative aspects of copyright.  In the last 24 hours, I’ve encountered a handful of artists rights proponents sharing links and comments proclaiming that the Copyright Act is about to be overhauled, that there is an Orphan Works proposal before Congress, and that visual artists in particular must immediately write to the Copyright Office by July 23rd to make their voices heard on these matters.

Stop.  Breathe.  None of this is true.

First of all, the Copyright Office is seeking input from photographers and other visual artists in order to gain insight as to how this class of creators might better monetize their works, enforce their rights, and more easily register works in the digital age.  The office is soliciting comments in the interest of better protecting creators’ interests, and this July 23rd request has nothing to do with Orphan Works, even if there were such a proposal on the Hill—which there is not.

As for Congress, the Judiciary Committee began holding hearings in April of 2013 as the first step in a comprehensive review of the Copyright Act, and the last of those hearings was held in April of this year.  Congress has thus far listened to 100 witnesses and, as stated by Chairman Goodlatte, “Over the next several months, the Committee will be reaching out to all stakeholders to invite them to share their views on the copyright issues we have examined over the course of our review so far, as well as any others.”  In case you’re unfamiliar with the sound, that’s the proverbial wheels of justice grinding slowly, which is what they’re supposed to do. (Okay, it’s a bit of a mixed metaphor for the legislature, but you get the idea.) It’s also worth noting that the last revision of the Copyright Act took several decades, and the outcome of this review process may not be a rewrite of the law. Hence, nothing is moving as rapidly as your Twitter and Facebook feeds.

The purpose of this review—hence the word review—is not to debate any specific changes to the law, but to assess the Copyright Act in a contemporary light and to hear testimony from experts and stakeholders with differing views as to the strengths and weaknesses of the law in our new technological times.  As such, there is neither an Orphan Works bill nor any other proposal before Congress to amend the Copyright Act. Not yet. Those days may come, and artists and creators should certainly remain involved when they do.

Artists and creators have typically been shouted down or bamboozled by heavily-funded corporate shills and the nouveau-savant within academia, who for various reasons have jumped on a bandwagon of hostility toward intellectual property.  They are the hysterics. They are the ones who cry SOPA every time anyone thinks to protect IP in the digital age. They are the ones who deflect any attempt to impose civil law upon Internet companies by manufacturing a backdoor conspiracy involving a pair of congressmen and a bag man from the MPAA.  Creators cannot afford to to play those games, not least because the antagonists to the interests of creators are masters at exploiting the hypocrisy of others while admitting no such errors in themselves.

Stay involved. Stay the course.  But stay informed.

Copyright Freak!

There’s a difference between debate and marketing.

Yesterday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation unveiled an online PR blitz called Copyright Week. The campaign’s launchpad is a webpage that asks visitors to consider and support “six principles,” one per day, over six days which happen to lead up to Silicon Valley’s very own independence day, January 18th, 2012, a.k.a. “SOPA Blackout Day.”  The roll-out of this campaign also coincides with today’s new round of hearings in the House Judiciary Committee in the ongoing process to review and potentially revise copyright in the United States.  Specifically, today’s hearing was focused on the scope of copyright, and while the EFF is determined that this debate should happen in the emotional realm of PR and marketing, even a brief viewing of the testimony on Capitol Hill should demonstrate that copyright reform is considerably more complex than the blunt, faux populist scaremongering we see in the EFF campaign.

For example, Carl Malamud, founder of Public.Resource.Org offered testimony that, on the surface sounds like something we can all support. The text of written law must be accessible in a free and open society and, therefore, sites like his, which provide easy access to this information should not ever run afoul of copyright protections.  Makes sense to me.  The law shouldn’t be copyrighted; it belongs to all of us.  But in questioning Malamud, Representative Collins of Georgia asserted that the law is publicly available, but that certain annotations, for instance, remain intellectual property. Eyes rolling the back of your head yet?  I can’t blame you because unless you’re an IP attorney or just like to follow copyright issues like some people follow sports stats, you’re probably going to tune out about here and find any number of more fun diversions.  And that’s cool, but this is what the real debate will probably look like; it’s complex and nuanced and in some cases, kinda dull.

By contrast, the EFF would prefer to manipulate you with a portrayal of an epic battle for the soul of the American dream itself. They would have you believe that copyright is, in our time, a golem destined to destroy the future of all technological advancement and the sacred right to self expression.  Never mind the fact that most copyright holders are the manifestation of self-expression, the Copyright Week campaign would rather distract you with a barrage of references to the international trade negotiation known as the TPP and scary words like secret.  And maybe there are hazards in the TPP of which we should be aware, but I’ll bet it isn’t the copyright provisions. And I say this because the EFF will overreach when its spokespeople say things like “copyright has no business in a trade agreement.”  Why?  If one of our most valuable products is intellectual property, why doesn’t the subject even belong at the negotiating table? Surely, when copyright industries can boast a trillion dollars in GDP, the issue must have a few more shades of gray than that.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation boasts the motto “Protecting your rights in the digital age,” but you might notice that this does not necessarily include protecting your rights from the digital age.  When Google or Facebook revise their Terms of Use policies to encroach ever further on your privacy or claim the right to use your kid’s birthday pictures in a paid ad, the EFF is silent. They are silent on the subject of cyber-mobs, which are an acute and clear infringement on their victims’ right to free expression and have even resulted in physical attacks.  They are silent on Google’s monetizing just about any form of human depravity from sex-slave trafficking to illegal narcotics to abusive and deadly depictions of atrocities on YouTube.  And for all its efforts to leverage our distrust of the American government to mask the agenda of Silicon Valley, the EFF is silent about the deepening influence of these government contractors who are the tech companies they serve.

So, by all means, if you care about the future of copyright from any perspective, I encourage you to follow the nuts and bolts of review in the coming year (if you can possibly stay awake through it all).  But failing that, at least don’t freak out because an organization like the EFF says  you should.  After all, it isn’t the Hollywood studios who can scan your emails, manipulate the flow of information on the Web, or might one day help develop an autonomous weapon. Pour a glass of wine, take a breath, and ask yourself a very simple question:  If you had to guess who has the greatest capacity to adversely affect your civil rights today, would it be the copyright holders or the data collectors? Cheers.

Spin This: Copyright Industries Grow at Twice the Rate of US Economy

A new report released today by the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) offers the following big headlines for FY2012:  the copyright industries, for the first time, contributed over $1 trillion to the U.S. economy, accounting for nearly 6.5% of GDP; these industries represent nearly 5% of all private-sector jobs (5.4 million) in the U.S.; these industries grew at an aggregate annual rate of 4.73%, which is more than twice the rate of the U.S. economy (2.1%) overall.

So, what are we to make of these numbers?  Or just as importantly, how will copyright’s antagonists spin this report?  They could try to punch holes in the findings themselves, but that seems unfruitful; numbers this big would have to be grossly inaccurate to suggest that copyright industries aren’t a critically important segment of GDP, as has been attempted in the past.  On the other hand, copyright’s foes could spin this report as “See, we told you internet phenomena like piracy aren’t hurting anyone. Look how good things are, you whiners.” But here’s the bottom line I think we should take away from this report and any pollyanna attempts to rebut or redirect its relevance:  copyright works, don’t break it.

Seriously, the only reason I write about this stuff is that a massively powerful — although not so economically valuable — minority of companies  spend a lot of time, energy, and money trying to reverse, weaken, or obliterate IP laws on a global scale; and if nothing else, I happen to think squandering the economic engine fueled by copyright is a really bad idea unless someone can demonstrate precisely why we should monkey with a trillion-dollars worth of GDP.  So far, for all the academic theorizing and economic divination that claims without any evidence that “copyright stifles innovation,” the record is clear that investment in these industries supports economic health, and that should matter to anyone with a job in any sector.  To put that in perspective, if you’re a truck driver, you are at least 5,000 times more likely to be delivering goods to someone who works in a copyright-supported industry than to someone who works for a company pushing to weaken this legal framework.  It should be understood that the antagonists to which I refer are not all technology companies by any means.  To the contrary, this report includes software and other technologies that rely substantially on copyrights.

This afternoon, the House Judiciary Committee resumes deliberations on an ongoing review of copyright; and while there are reasonable grounds for revising this body of law, the process should, in my opinion, be viewed as requiring surgical revisions with particular attention to more robustly protecting the independent entrepreneur in the digital market.  Beyond that, it is hard to fathom why any American would want to needlessly and recklessly tamper with a system that promotes this kind of economic prosperity.  We have enough real problems.  Copyright isn’t one of them.