Standing up for student privacy, the University of Oregon has refused to identify “alleged infringers” at record labels’ request. Unlike most universities, which have identified students, U of O recently moved to quash the labels’ discovery subpoena in Arista et al. v. Does 1-17. Ray Beckerman links the documents at Recording Industry vs The People. See also Associated Press.
The university argues in its brief that the subpoena imposes an undue burden on the university “because it requires the University to affirmatively investigate potential copyright infringement by its users.” Particularly on a campus, where a single IP address might be shared my multiple roommates, visitors, or users of an open access point, the IP address will not uniquely identify a person. The U of O doesn’t want to go net-fishing, as the record labels do, turning over student names that might match their complaint, but says it would have to “undertake an investigation of all the individuals who were or who may have been present in the shared rooms in question at the time of the alleged acts of copyright infringement,” including interviews and forensic investigations, in order to turn over the right names. Even where the university can find the occupant of a single room, that identifies only the occupant, “not the identity of the user engaged in the alleged copyright infringement.”
The university should not be forced to do the record labels’ investigations for them. As I’ve argued in The Crimson and at Cornell, this demand conflicts with the mission of a university. As Oregon puts it, “The University … has both a legal and an ethical obligation to ensure that its students’ right to privacy is protected under the law and defended against intrusion.”
While Oregon’s other arguments are weaker, this one is enough. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure proscribe subpoenas that subject their recipients to “undue burden” and the University of Oregon demonstrates that complying thoroughly and responsibly with this subpoena would place severe and unjustified burden on the educational institution.
In a welcome move of openness, C-SPAN has announced a liberalized copyright assertion policy:
C-SPAN is introducing a liberalized copyright policy for current, future, and past coverage of any official events sponsored by Congress and any federal agency– about half of all programming offered on the C-SPAN television networks–which will allow non-commercial copying, sharing, and posting of C-SPAN video on the Internet, with attribution.
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The new C-SPAN policy borrows from the approach to copyright known in the online community as “Creative Commons.” Examples of events included under C-SPAN’s new expanded policy include all congressional hearings and press briefings, federal agency hearings, and presidential events at the White House.
This seems much smarter than going after members of Congress for blogging the network’s footage of Congressional hearings. C-SPAN often provides the only window into the workings of our government. Now, those windows are more clearly open.
Update: Thanks to Carl Malamud for publicly pressing C-SPAN to do the right thing here.
There’s a difference between copyright assertion and copyright ownership. Like William Patry, I would have defended Speaker Pelosi’s un-permissioned use of C-SPAN videos of Congressional hearings as non-infringing or as fair use. She, however, she chose to take them down and replace them (at some trouble or expense) with alternate videos from committee cameras in response to C-SPAN’s assertion.
As Speaker Pelosi’s story indicates, whether or not C-SPAN has a copyright in the minimal creativity of positioning cameras before a government hearing, its copyright claims prevented some people from using the streams. That chill operates as a law in itself, reducing the discourse around political events from what it could be if people felt secure in their non-infringing use of videos. C-SPAN’s announcement can reduce the uncertainty. We need not concede that the videos are protected by copyright to welcome a promise not to assert copyright claims.
What do anthropologists, teachers, cultural leaders, digital artists, technologists, and lawyers do when they get together? Well, a group of us convened in Maine earlier this winter to talk about cultural sharing: As western corporations seek out the traditional knowledge of farmers and healers in the developing world, or artists seek ways to share their art with corporate audiences, could we develop frameworks in which those from different cultural backgrounds could share knowledge on equal footing?
A few intense days of discussion developed a Cross-Cultural Partnership framework, using the legal infrastructure of a partnership agreement to enable the parties to describe their joint and separate goals in a common project. The framework provides a bare template, to which those working together must add descriptions of their aims and intentions. It’s our hope that the entanglement of the partnership form, requiring greater personal involvement than an arms’-length contract or license, will help parties to bridge different values and backgrounds.
We’re still in early draft and I welcome readers’ thoughts and comments. Excerpts from the template’s preamble follow the “More” link.
The NYT runs a story on “Dueling Magicians”, describing Ricky Jay’s claims that Eric Walton has borrowed a few too many tricks. Walton’s reply: “This material has been out there…. The best magicians can do is take existing routines and sort of put our own spin on them.”
Interestingly, the subject of copyright never comes up — and that’s probably appropriate. While a magician’s patter while performing may be protectable expression, the tricks themselves are likely unprotectable ideas, methods, and processes. Of course that still leaves “selection and arrangement,” and it’s possible one act could mimic another so closely that it appropriated those expressive elements.
If it didn’t violate copyright, Walton’s act does seem to have tweaked some magicians’ ethical sense. Says Teller, of Penn and Teller:
If an act hasnt been prominently performed for a long time, and someone takes the trouble to bring it back from absolute death and put it into his act with fine touches, and which at least hasnt been seen by a current generation, he said, the gentlemanly thing to do is say, Thats his for now.
That said, he added, magicians are not unique in their absence of creativity.
I do hope he wasn’t referring to lawyers with that last jab.
Boing Boing links the clever short film [ airport ], made entirely from the common airport direction and instruction symbols.
Also cool is the AIGA page where the design association makes all the symbols available in EPS and GIF formats:
This system of 50 symbol signs was designed for use at the crossroads of modern life: in airports and other transportation hubs and at large international events. Produced through a collaboration between the AIGA and the U.S. Department of Transportation, they are an example of how public-minded designers can address a universal communication need.
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These copyright-free symbols have become the standard for off-the-shelf symbols in the catalogues of U.S. sign companies.
Indeed, I’d suggest that the symbols’ freedom from trademark and copyright claims has directly spurred their widespread adoption, which in turn has helped to make them more universally understood. Score one more for the commons.
The information commons movement has great stories, and with the new book The Wealth of Networks, Yochai Benkler is establishing himself as another of its great storytellers.
At a book talk last night, Benkler outlined an economic history of information production. We’re moving from the age of industrial information production to one of social information production. Ever-faster computers on our desks let us individually produce what would have taken a firm to organize just a decade ago. Ever-further networks let us share that with the world as cheaply as storing it for ourselves. This “social production” is distributed and motivated by social relationships rather than market signals.
As Benkler contextualizes this activity, it’s not outside or in opposition to economics, but part of the economy. Commons production can be used by market-driven actors and by ideologically motivated purists. As it spreads, though, it enhances not only bottom lines but political freedom.
In an example near to my heart, Benkler showed the pressures e-voting vendor Diebold faced from the circulation of source code and internal emails. But in Benkler’s story, the chief heroes weren’t the lawyers wyho stepped up to defend against claims of copyright infringement — after all, it took a year before the court ordered Diebold to pay our costs and fees — but the distributed participants who published and kept the memos and code online in the face of legal threats. Even without the legal muscle of a New York Times, activists kept the story alive through social propagation.
Benkler’s slide set ended at a moment of conflict. The new modes of social information production threaten established industries and so industral infogiants fight back with old weapons: legislation such as DMCA, monopoly power in non-neutral networks, patent thickets. Yet Benkler is an optimist. He’s leaving future slides to be completed by the socially organized forces he celebrates. Here’s the wiki!
The gang at Participatory Culture have just released Democracy Internet TV — digital “television” as it should be, where we’re both viewers and broadcasters. “Democracy” is a multi-platform combination RSS-reader/video player that helps you get the video you want, when and where you want it.
The Democracy internet TV platform is a free and open way to watch, share, and broadcast video on the internet. You can read about it below or get right to it: Get Democracy.
Cyberprof Susan Crawford has a nice preview of David Post’s forthcoming work, Mr. Jefferson’s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace.
Jefferson’s moose was a specimen brought to England and assembled there to disprove the notion that America was a land of “degeneracy.” Post and Crawford ask: What would you exhibit from cyberspace to prove its worth to a foreign observer?
I started my cyberlaw class with an exploration of analogy in Reno v. ACLU: What is cyberspace like (a telephone network with dial-a-porn, a radio broadcast, a magazine shop, a city block)? and ended by noting the limitations of any analogy to capture the Internet’s communicative potential. It’s not just “a phone network, with pictures” or “a magazine shop where anyone can publish a zine,” but a new beast with the potential to be those and much more — and that frightens regulators and incumbents who know the old and face competition from the new. So along with analogies to older technologies, we need specimens of what’s possible with the new. Happily, the Net provides us new ones daily — and we don’t even need to pack them for shipment across the Atlantic.
Blogging will be light here while my students take their exams. Wouldn’t want anyone to think there were secret answers hidden in blog entries. But how could I pass up the excuse to post moose photos from Jackson Hole?
Amazon charts despite being uncopyrightable and freelyavailableon the web. It’s one of the of the few types of works left — works of government authorship — that enters the modern public domain.
According to the typical copyright story playing in Washington, this publication and its profits for the publisher shouldn’t have happened. What would be the incentive to publish a book that anyone else could freely read and even republish? Yet it seems that some people still want to read on bound paper, and a publisher can still make money by being first to market at a reasonable price. Of course the newsworthiness of the event and subject had plenty to do with this story, but it helps show, as do and Lawrence Lessig’s experience with it, that total control isn’t the only workable business model for publishers.
Eric Eldred, librarian for the public domain, wanted to help people to help themselves to free copies of Walden, at Walden Pond. The park supervisor didn’t approve, according to The Boston Globe:
Denise Morrissey, the park supervisor who told Eldred he had to leave, said her agency discourages competition from outsiders who could take away business from the two concessions that pay for a spot on the reservation: an ice cream truck and the gift shop run by the Thoreau Society.
“If you’re going to give away books for free,” she said, “it might take away business” from the shop.
Even 150 years later, it seems Thoreau can’t escape the pressures of commerce.
Indeed, I’d suggest that the symbols’ freedom from trademark and copyright claims has directly spurred their widespread adoption, which in turn has helped to make them more universally understood. Score one more for the commons.
