1 <html><head><meta http-equiv=
"Content-Type" content=
"text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"><title>Fri kultur
</title><meta name=
"generator" content=
"DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.75.2"><meta name=
"description" content=
"Om forfatteren Lawrense Lessig (http://www.lessig.org), professor i juss og en John A. Wilson Distinguished Faculty Scholar ved Stanford Law School, er stifteren av Stanford Center for Internet and Society og styreleder i Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org). Forfatteren har gitt ut The Future of Ideas (Random House, 2001) og Code: And other Laws of Cyberspace (Basic Books, 1999), og er medlem av styrene i Public Library of Science, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, og Public Knowledge. Han har vunnet Free Software Foundation's Award for the Advancement of Free Software, to ganger vært oppført i BusinessWeek's "e.biz 25," og omtalt som en av Scientific American's "50 visjonærer". Etter utdanning ved University of Pennsylvania, Cambridge University, og Yale Law School, assisterte Lessig dommer Richard Posner ved U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals."></head><body bgcolor=
"white" text=
"black" link=
"#0000FF" vlink=
"#840084" alink=
"#0000FF"><div lang=
"nb" class=
"book" title=
"Fri kultur"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h1 class=
"title"><a name=
"index"></a>Fri kultur
</h1></div><div><h2 class=
"subtitle">Hvordan store mediaaktører bruker teknologi og loven til å låse ned kulturen
2 og kontrollere kreativiteten
</h2></div><div><div class=
"authorgroup"><div class=
"author"><h3 class=
"author"><span class=
"firstname">Lawrence
</span> <span class=
"surname">Lessig
</span></h3></div></div></div><div><p class=
"releaseinfo">Versjon
2004-
02-
10</p></div><div><p class=
"copyright">Opphavsrett ©
2004 Lawrence Lessig
</p></div><div><div class=
"legalnotice" title=
"Rettslig merknad"><a name=
"id2559063"></a><p>
3 Denne versjonen av
<em class=
"citetitle">Fri Kultur
</em> er lisensert med en
4 Creative Commons-lisens. Denne lisensen tillater ikke-kommersiell
5 utnyttelse av verket, hvis opphavsinnehaveren er navngitt. For mer
6 informasjon om lisensen, klikk på ikonet over eller besøk
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/1.0/" target=
"_top">http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/
1.0/
</a>
7 </p></div></div><div><p class=
"pubdate">2004-
03-
25</p></div><div><div class=
"abstract" title=
"Om forfatteren"><p class=
"title"><b>Om forfatteren
</b></p><p>
8 Lawrense Lessig (
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://www.lessig.org/" target=
"_top">http://www.lessig.org
</a>), professor i
9 juss og en John A. Wilson Distinguished Faculty Scholar ved Stanford Law
10 School, er stifteren av Stanford Center for Internet and Society og
11 styreleder i Creative Commons (
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://creativecommons.org/" target=
"_top">http://creativecommons.org
</a>).
12 Forfatteren har gitt ut The Future of Ideas (Random House,
2001) og Code:
13 And other Laws of Cyberspace (Basic Books,
1999), og er medlem av styrene i
14 Public Library of Science, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, og Public
15 Knowledge. Han har vunnet Free Software Foundation's Award for the
16 Advancement of Free Software, to ganger vært oppført i BusinessWeek's "e.biz
17 25," og omtalt som en av Scientific American's "
50 visjonærer". Etter
18 utdanning ved University of Pennsylvania, Cambridge University, og Yale Law
19 School, assisterte Lessig dommer Richard Posner ved U.S. Seventh Circuit
21 </p></div></div></div><hr></div><div class=
"dedication" title=
"Dedikasjon"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h2 class=
"title"><a name=
"id2528749"></a>Dedikasjon
</h2></div></div></div><p>
22 Til Eric Eldred
— hvis arbeid først trakk meg til denne saken, og for
23 hvem saken fortsetter.
25 </p><div class=
"figure"><a name=
"CreativeCommons"></a><p class=
"title"><b>Figur
1. Creative Commons, noen rettigheter reservert
</b></p><div class=
"figure-contents"><div><img src=
"images/cc.png" alt=
"Creative Commons, noen rettigheter reservert"></div></div></div><p><br class=
"figure-break">
26 </p></div><div class=
"toc"><p><b>Innholdsfortegnelse
</b></p><dl><dt><span class=
"preface"><a href=
"#preface">Forord
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"chapter"><a href=
"#c-introduction">1. Introduksjon
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"part"><a href=
"#c-piracy">I. "Piratvirksomhet"
</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class=
"chapter"><a href=
"#creators">2. Kapittel en: Skaperne
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"chapter"><a href=
"#mere-copyists">3. Kapittel to:
"Kun etter-apere"</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"chapter"><a href=
"#catalogs">4. Kapittel tre: Kataloger
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"chapter"><a href=
"#pirates">5. Kapittel fire:
"Pirater"</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#film">Film
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#recordedmusic">Innspilt musikk
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#radio">Radio
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#cabletv">Kabel-TV
</a></span></dt></dl></dd><dt><span class=
"chapter"><a href=
"#piracy">6. Kapittel fem:
"Piratvirksomhet"</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#piracy-i">Piracy I
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#piracy-ii">Piracy II
</a></span></dt></dl></dd></dl></dd><dt><span class=
"part"><a href=
"#c-property">II. "Eiendom"
</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class=
"chapter"><a href=
"#founders">7. Kapittel seks: Grunnleggerne
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"chapter"><a href=
"#recorders">8. Kapittel sju: Innspillerne
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"chapter"><a href=
"#transformers">9. Kapittel åtte: Omformere
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"chapter"><a href=
"#collectors">10. Kapittel ni: Samlere
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"chapter"><a href=
"#property-i">11. Kapittel ti:
"Eiendom"</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#hollywood">Hvorfor Hollywood har rett
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#beginnings">Opphav
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#lawduration">Loven: Varighet
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#lawscope">Loven: Virkeområde
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#lawreach">Lov og arkitektur: Rekkevidde
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#lawforce">Arkitektur og lov: Makt
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#marketconcentration">Marked: Konsentrasjon
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#together">Sammen
</a></span></dt></dl></dd></dl></dd><dt><span class=
"part"><a href=
"#c-puzzles">III. Nøtter
</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class=
"chapter"><a href=
"#chimera">12. Kapittel elleve: Chimera
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"chapter"><a href=
"#harms">13. Kapittel tolv: Skader
</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#constrain">Constraining Creators
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#innovators">Constraining Innovators
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#corruptingcitizens">Corrupting Citizens
</a></span></dt></dl></dd></dl></dd><dt><span class=
"part"><a href=
"#c-balances">IV. Maktfordeling
</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class=
"chapter"><a href=
"#eldred">14. Kapittel tretten: Eldred
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"chapter"><a href=
"#eldred-ii">15. Kapittel fjorten: Eldred II
</a></span></dt></dl></dd><dt><span class=
"part"><a href=
"#c-conclusion">V. Konklusjon
</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class=
"chapter"><a href=
"#id2602879">16.
</a></span></dt></dl></dd><dt><span class=
"part"><a href=
"#c-afterword">VI. Etterord
</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class=
"chapter"><a href=
"#id2605235">17.
</a></span></dt></dl></dd><dt><span class=
"chapter"><a href=
"#c-notes">18. Notater
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"chapter"><a href=
"#c-acknowledgments">19. Takk til
</a></span></dt></dl></div><div class=
"list-of-figures"><p><b>Figuroversikt
</b></p><dl><dt>1.
<a href=
"#CreativeCommons">Creative Commons, noen rettigheter reservert
</a></dt><dt>11.1.
<a href=
"#fig-1331">How four different modalities of regulation interact to support or weaken
27 the right or regulation.
</a></dt><dt>11.2.
<a href=
"#fig-1361">Law has a special role in affecting the three.
</a></dt><dt>11.3.
<a href=
"#fig-1371">Copyright's regulation before the Internet.
</a></dt><dt>11.4.
<a href=
"#fig-1381">effective state of anarchy after the Internet.
</a></dt><dt>11.5.
<a href=
"#fig-1441">Copyright's regulation before the Internet.
</a></dt><dt>11.6.
<a href=
"#fig-1442">"Opphavsrett" i dag.
</a></dt><dt>11.7.
<a href=
"#fig-1521">Alle potensielle bruk av en bok.
</a></dt><dt>11.8.
<a href=
"#fig-1531">Eksempler på uregulert bruk av en bok.
</a></dt><dt>11.9.
<a href=
"#fig-1541">Republishing stands at the core of this circle of possible uses of a
28 copyrighted work.
</a></dt><dt>11.10.
<a href=
"#fig-1542">Uregulert kopiering anses som "rimelig bruk".
</a></dt><dt>11.11.
<a href=
"#fig-1551">Uses that before were presumptively unregulated are now presumptively
29 regulated.
</a></dt><dt>11.12.
<a href=
"#fig-1611">Bilde av en gammel versjon av Adobe eBook Reader.
</a></dt><dt>11.13.
<a href=
"#fig-1612">List of the permissions that the publisher purports to grant.
</a></dt><dt>11.14.
<a href=
"#fig-1621">E-book of Aristotle;s "Politics"
</a></dt><dt>11.15.
<a href=
"#fig-1622">Liste med tillatelser for Aristotles "Politics".
</a></dt><dt>11.16.
<a href=
"#fig-1631">List of the permissions for "The Future of Ideas".
</a></dt><dt>11.17.
<a href=
"#fig-1641">List of the permissions for "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland".
</a></dt><dt>11.18.
<a href=
"#fig-1711">VCR/handgun cartoon.
</a></dt><dt>11.19.
<a href=
"#fig-1761">Mønster for moderne mediaeierskap.
</a></dt></dl></div><div class=
"list-of-tables"><p><b>tabelloversikt
</b></p><dl><dt>6.1.
<a href=
"#t1">Tabell
</a></dt><dt>11.1.
<a href=
"#t2"></a></dt><dt>11.2.
<a href=
"#t3"></a></dt><dt>11.3.
<a href=
"#t4"></a></dt><dt>11.4.
<a href=
"#t5"></a></dt></dl></div><div class=
"colophon" title=
"Kolofon"><h2 class=
"title"><a name=
"id2568922"></a>Kolofon
</h2><p>
30 Du kan kjøpe en kopi av denne boken ved å klikke på en av lenkene nedenfor:
31 </p><div class=
"itemizedlist"><ul class=
"itemizedlist" type=
"number" compact
><li class=
"listitem" style=
"list-style-type: number"><p><a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://www.amazon.com/" target=
"_top">Amazon
</a></p></li><li class=
"listitem" style=
"list-style-type: number"><p><a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://www.barnesandnoble.com/" target=
"_top">B
&N
</a></p></li><li class=
"listitem" style=
"list-style-type: number"><p><a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://www.penguin.com/" target=
"_top">Penguin
</a></p></li></ul></div><p>
32 Andre bøker av Lawrence Lessig
34 The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World
36 Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace
38 The Penguin Press, New York
42 Hvordan store mediaaktører bruker teknologi og loven til å låse ned kulturen
43 og kontrollere kreativiteten
47 THE PENGUIN PRESS, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
375 Hudson Street
50 Opphavsrettbeskyttet © Lawrence Lessig. Alle rettigheter reservert.
52 Excerpt from an editorial titled "The Coming of Copyright Perpetuity,"
53 <em class=
"citetitle">The New York Times
</em>, January
16,
2003. Copyright
54 ©
2003 by The New York Times Co. Reprinted with permission.
56 Cartoon in
<a class=
"xref" href=
"#fig-1711" title=
"Figur 11.18. VCR/handgun cartoon.">Figur
11.18,
“VCR/handgun cartoon.
”</a> by Paul Conrad, copyright Tribune
57 Media Services, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
59 Diagram in
<a class=
"xref" href=
"#fig-1761" title=
"Figur 11.19. Mønster for moderne mediaeierskap.">Figur
11.19,
“Mønster for moderne mediaeierskap.
”</a> courtesy of the office of FCC
60 Commissioner, Michael J. Copps.
62 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
64 Lessig, Lawrence. Free culture : how big media uses technology and the law
65 to lock down culture and control creativity / Lawrence Lessig.
71 ISBN
1-
59420-
006-
8 (hardcover)
73 1. Intellectual property
—United States.
2. Mass media
—United
76 3. Technological innovations
—United States.
4. Art
—United
83 This book is printed on acid-free paper.
85 Printed in the United States of America
89 Designed by Marysarah Quinn
91 Oversatt til bokmål av Petter Reinholdtsen og Anders Hagen
92 Jarmund. Kildefilene til oversetterprosjektet er
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig" target=
"_top">tilgjengelig
93 fra github
</a>. Rapporter feil med oversettelsen via github.
95 Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this
96 publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval
97 system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
98 photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission
99 of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. The
100 scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via
101 any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and
102 punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and
103 do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted
104 materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.
105 </p></div><div class=
"preface" title=
"Forord"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h2 class=
"title"><a name=
"preface"></a>Forord
</h2></div></div></div><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"idxpoguedavid"></a><p>
106 David Pogue, en glimrende skribent og forfatter av utallige tekniske
107 datarelaterte tekster, skrev dette på slutten av hans gjennomgang av min
108 første bok,
<em class=
"citetitle">Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace
</em>:
109 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
110 I motsetning til faktiske lover, så har ikke internett-programvare
111 kapasiteten til å straffe. Den påvirker ikke folk som ikke er online (og
112 kun en veldig liten minoritet av verdens befolkning er online). Og hvis du
113 ikke liker systemet på internett, så kan du alltid slå av
114 modemet.
<sup>[
<a name=
"preface01" href=
"#ftn.preface01" class=
"footnote">1</a>]
</sup>
115 </p></blockquote></div><p>
116 Pogue var skeptisk til argumentet som er kjernen av boken
— at
117 programvaren, eller "koden", fungerte som en slags lov
— og foreslo i
118 sin anmeldelse den lykkelig tanken at hvis livet i cyberspace gikk dårlig,
119 så kan vi alltid som med en trylleformel slå over en bryter og komme hjem
120 igjen. Slå av modemet, koble fra datamaskinen, og eventuelle problemer som
121 finnes
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>den
</em></span> virkeligheten ville ikke "påvirke" oss mer.
124 Pogue kan ha hatt rett i
1999 — jeg er skeptisk, men det kan
125 hende. Men selv om han hadde rett da, så er ikke argumentet gyldig
126 nå.
<em class=
"citetitle">Fri Kultur
</em> er om problemene internett forårsaker
127 selv etter at modemet er slått av. Den er et argument om hvordan slagene
128 som nå brer om seg i livet on-line har fundamentalt påvirket "folk som er
129 ikke pålogget." Det finnes ingen bryter som kan isolere oss fra
131 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2553022"></a><p>
132 Men i motsetning til i boken
<em class=
"citetitle">Code
</em>, er argumentet her
133 ikke så mye om internett i seg selv. Istedet er det om konsekvensen av
134 internett for en del av vår tradisjon som er mye mer grunnleggende, og
135 uansett hvor hardt dette er for en geek-wanna-be å innrømme, mye viktigere.
137 Den tradisjonen er måten vår kultur blir laget på. Som jeg vil forklare i
138 sidene som følger, kommer vi fra en tradisjon av "fri kultur"
—ikke
139 "fri" som i "fri bar" (for å låne et uttrykk fra stifteren av fri
140 programvarebevegelsen
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2553004" href=
"#ftn.id2553004" class=
"footnote">2</a>]
</sup>), men "fri" som i
141 "talefrihet", "fritt marked", "frihandel", "fri konkurranse", "fri vilje" og
142 "frie valg". En fri kultur støtter og beskytter skapere og oppfinnere.
143 Dette gjør den direkte ved å tildele immaterielle rettigheter. Men det gjør
144 den indirekte ved å begrense rekkevidden for disse rettighetene, for å
145 garantere at neste generasjon skapere og oppfinnere forblir
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>så fri
146 som mulig
</em></span> fra kontroll fra fortiden. En fri kultur er ikke en
147 kultur uten eierskap, like lite som et fritt marked er et marked der alt er
148 gratis. Det motsatte av fri kultur er "tillatelseskultur"
—en kultur
149 der skapere kun kan skape med tillatelse fra de mektige, eller fra skaperne
152 Hvis vi forsto denne endringen, så tror jeg vi ville stå imot den. Ikke
153 "vi" på venstresiden eller "dere" på høyresiden, men vi som ikke har
154 investert i den bestemt kulturindustrien som har definert det tjuende
155 århundre. Enten du er på venstre eller høyresiden, hvis du i denne forstand
156 ikke har interesser, vil historien jeg forteller her gi deg problemer. For
157 endringene jeg beskriver påvirker verdier som begge sider av vår politiske
158 kultur anser som grunnleggende.
159 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2553105"></a><p>
160 Vi så et glimt av dette tverrpolitiske raseri på forsommeren i
2003. Da FCC
161 vurderte endringer i reglene for medieeierskap som ville slakke på
162 begrensningene rundt mediakonsentrasjon, sendte en ekstraordinær koalisjon
163 mer enn
700 000 brev til FCC for å motsette seg endringen. Mens William
164 Safire beskrev å marsjere "ubehagelig sammen med CodePink Women for Peace
165 and the National Rifle Association, mellom liberale Olympia Snowe og
166 konservative Ted Stevens", formulerte han kanskje det enkleste uttrykket
167 for hva som var på spill: konsentrasjonen av makt. Så spurte han:
168 <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2553124"></a>
169 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
170 Høres dette ikke-konservativt ut? Ikke for meg. Denne konsentrasjonen av
171 makt
—politisk, selskapsmessig, pressemessig, kulturelt
—bør være
172 bannlyst av konservative. Spredningen av makt gjennom lokal kontroll, og
173 derigjennom oppmuntre til individuell deltagelse, er essensen i føderalismen
174 og det største uttrykk for demokrati.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2553086" href=
"#ftn.id2553086" class=
"footnote">3</a>]
</sup>
175 </p></blockquote></div><p>
176 Denne idéen er et element i argumentet til
<em class=
"citetitle">Fri
177 Kultur
</em>, selv om min fokus ikke bare er på konsentrasjonen av
178 makt som følger av konsentrasjonen i eierskap, men mer viktig, og fordi det
179 er mindre synlig, på konsentrasjonen av makt som er resultat av en radikal
180 endring i det effektive virkeområdet til loven. Loven er i endring, og
181 endringen forandrer på hvordan vår kultur blir skapt. Den endringen bør
182 bekymre deg
—Uansett om du bryr deg om internett eller ikke, og uansett
183 om du er til venstre for Safires eller til høyre. Inspirasjonen til tittelen
184 og mye av argumentet i denne boken kommer fra arbeidet til Richard Stallman
185 og Free Software Foundation. Faktisk, da jeg leste Stallmans egne tekster på
186 nytt, spesielt essyene i
<em class=
"citetitle">Free Software, Free Society
</em>,
187 innser jeg at alle de teoretiske innsiktene jeg utvikler her er innsikter
188 som Stallman beskrev for tiår siden. Man kan dermed godt argumentere for at
189 dette verket kun er et avledet verk.
192 Jeg godtar kritikken, hvis det faktisk er kritikk. Arbeidet til en advokat
193 er alltid avledede verker, og jeg mener ikke å gjøre noe mer i denne boken
194 enn å minne en kultur om en tradisjon som alltid har vært deres egen. Som
195 Stallman forsvarer jeg denne tradisjonen på grunnlag av verdier. Som
196 Stallman tror jeg dette er verdiene til frihet. Og som Stallman, tror jeg
197 dette er verdier fra vår fortid som må forsvares i vår fremtid. En fri
198 kultur har vært vår fortid, men vil bare være vår fremtid hvis vi endrer
199 retningen vi følger akkurat nå. På samme måte som Stallmans argumenter for
200 fri programvare, treffer argumenter for en fri kultur på forvirring som er
201 vanskelig å unngå, og enda vanskeligere å forstå. En fri kultur er ikke en
202 kultur uten eierskap. Det er ikke en kultur der kunstnere ikke får
203 betalt. En kultur uten eierskap eller en der skaperne ikke kan få betalt, er
204 anarki, ikke frihet. Anarki er ikke hva jeg fremmer her.
206 I stedet er den frie kulturen som jeg forsvarer i denne boken en balanse
207 mellom anarki og kontroll. En fri kultur, i likhet med et fritt marked, er
208 fylt med eierskap. Den er fylt med regler for eierskap og kontrakter som
209 blir håndhevet av staten. Men på samme måte som det frie markedet blir
210 pervertert hvis dets eierskap blir føydalt, så kan en fri kultur bli ødelagt
211 av ekstremisme i eierskapsrettighetene som definerer den. Det er dette jeg
212 frykter om vår kultur i dag. Det er som motpol til denne ekstremismen at
213 denne boken er skrevet.
214 </p><div class=
"footnotes"><br><hr width=
"100" align=
"left"><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.preface01" href=
"#preface01" class=
"para">1</a>]
</sup>
215 David Pogue, "Don't Just Chat, Do Something,"
<em class=
"citetitle">New York
216 Times
</em>,
30. januar
2000
217 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2553004" href=
"#id2553004" class=
"para">2</a>]
</sup>
218 Richard M. Stallman,
<em class=
"citetitle">Fri programvare, Frie samfunn
</em> 57
219 (Joshua Gay, red.
2002).
220 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2553086" href=
"#id2553086" class=
"para">3</a>]
</sup> William Safire, "The Great Media Gulp,"
<em class=
"citetitle">New York
221 Times
</em>,
22. mai
2003.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2553153"></a>
222 </p></div></div></div><div class=
"chapter" title=
"Kapittel 1. Introduksjon"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h2 class=
"title"><a name=
"c-introduction"></a>Kapittel
1. Introduksjon
</h2></div></div></div><p>
223 17. desember
1903, på en vindfylt strand i Nord-Carolina i såvidt under
224 hundre sekunder, demonstrerte Wright-brødrene at et selvdrevet fartøy tyngre
225 enn luft kunne fly. Øyeblikket var elektrisk, og dens betydning ble alment
226 forstått. Nesten umiddelbart, eksploderte interessen for denne nye
227 teknologien som muliggjorde bemannet luftfart og en hærskare av oppfinnere
228 begynte å bygge videre på den.
230 Da Wright-brødrene fant opp flymaskinen, hevdet loven i USA at en grunneier
231 ble antatt å eie ikke bare overflaten på området sitt, men også alt landet
232 under bakken, helt ned til senterpunktet i jorda, og alt volumet over
233 bakken, "i ubestemt grad, oppover".
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2528165" href=
"#ftn.id2528165" class=
"footnote">4</a>]
</sup> I
234 mange år undret lærde over hvordan en best skulle tolke idéen om at
235 eiendomsretten gikk helt til himmelen. Betød dette at du eide stjernene?
236 Kunne en dømme gjess for at de regelmessig og med vilje tok seg inn på annen
239 Så kom flymaskiner, og for første gang hadde dette prinsippet i lovverket i
240 USA
—dypt nede i grunnlaget for vår tradisjon og akseptert av de
241 viktigste juridiske tenkerne i vår fortid
—en betydning. Hvis min
242 eiendom rekker til himmelen, hva skjer når United flyr over mitt område?
243 Har jeg rett til å nekte dem å bruke min eiendom? Har jeg mulighet til å
244 inngå en eksklusiv avtale med Delta Airlines? Kan vi gjennomføre en auksjon
245 for å finne ut hvor mye disse rettighetene er verdt?
246 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2528185"></a><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2528211"></a><p>
247 I
1945 ble disse spørsmålene en føderal sak. Da bøndene Thomas Lee og Tinie
248 Causby i Nord Carolina begynte å miste kyllinger på grunn av lavtflygende
249 militære fly (vettskremte kyllinger fløy tilsynelatende i låveveggene og
250 døde), saksøkte Causbyene regjeringen for å trenge seg inn på deres
251 eiendom. Flyene rørte selvfølgelig aldri overflaten på Causbys' eiendom. Men
252 hvis det stemte som Blackstone, Kent, og Cola hadde sagt, at deres eiendom
253 strakk seg "i ubestemt grad, oppover," så hadde regjeringen trengt seg inn
254 på deres eiendom, og Causbys ønsket å sette en stopper for dette.
255 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2528231"></a><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2528238"></a><p>
256 Høyesterett gikk med på å ta opp Causbys sak. Kongressen hadde vedtatt at
257 luftfartsveiene var tilgjengelig for alle, men hvis ens eiendom virkelig
258 rakk til himmelen, da kunne muligens kongressens vedtak ha vært i strid med
259 grunnlovens forbud mot å "ta" eiendom uten kompensasjon. Retten erkjente at
260 "det er gammel doktrine etter sedvane at en eiendom rakk til utkanten av
261 universet.", men dommer Douglas hadde ikke tålmodighet for forhistoriske
262 doktriner. I et enkelt avsnitt, ble hundrevis av år med
263 eiendomslovgivningen strøket. Som han skrev på vegne av retten,
264 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
265 [Denne] doktrinen har ingen plass i den moderne verden. Luften er en
266 offentlig motorvei, slik kongressen har erklært. Hvis det ikke var
267 tilfelle, ville hver eneste transkontinentale flyrute utsette operatørene
268 for utallige søksmål om inntrenging på annen manns eiendom. Idéen er i
269 strid med sunn fornuft. Å anerkjenne slike private krav til luftrommet
270 ville blokkere disse motorveiene, seriøst forstyrre muligheten til kontroll
271 og utvikling av dem i fellesskapets interesse og overføre til privat
272 eierskap det som kun fellesskapet har et rimelig krav til.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2528277" href=
"#ftn.id2528277" class=
"footnote">5</a>]
</sup>
273 </p></blockquote></div><p>
274 "Idéen er i strid med sunn fornuft."
277 Det er hvordan loven vanligvis fungerer. Ikke ofte like brått eller
278 utålmodig, men til slutt er dette hvordan loven fungerer. Det var ikke
279 stilen til Douglas å utbrodere. Andre dommere ville ha skrevet mange flere
280 sider før de nådde sin konklusjon, men for Douglas holdt det med en enkel
281 linje: "Idéen er i strid med sunn fornuft.". Men uansett om det tar flere
282 sider eller kun noen få ord, så er det en genial egenskap med et
283 lovpraksis-system, slik som vårt er, at loven tilpasser seg til aktuelle
284 teknologiene. Og mens den tilpasser seg, så endres den. Idéer som var
285 solide som fjell i en tidsalder knuses i en annen.
286 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2581889"></a><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2581896"></a><p>
287 Eller, det er hvordan ting skjer når det ikke er noen mektige på andre siden
288 av endringen. Causbyene var bare bønder. Og selv om det uten tvil var
289 mange som dem som var lei av den økende trafikken i luften (og en håper ikke
290 for mange kyllinger flakset seg inn i vegger), ville Causbyene i verden
291 finne det svært hardt å samles for å stoppe idéen, og teknologien, som
292 Wright-brødrene hadde ført til verden. Wright-brødrene spyttet flymaskiner
293 inn i den teknologiske meme-dammen. Idéen spredte seg deretter som et virus
294 i en kyllingfarm. Causbyene i verden fant seg selv omringet av "det synes
295 rimelig" gitt teknologien som Wright-brødrene hadde produsert. De kunne stå
296 på sine gårder, med døde kyllinger i hendene, og heve knyttneven mot disse
297 nye teknologiene så mye de ville. De kunne ringe sine representanter eller
298 til og med saksøke. Men når alt kom til alt, ville kraften i det som virket
299 "åpenbart" for alle andre
—makten til "sunn fornuft"
—ville vinne
300 frem. Deres "personlige interesser" ville ikke få lov til å nedkjempe en
301 åpenbar fordel for fellesskapet.
303 Edwin Howard Armstrong er en av USAs glemte oppfinnergenier. Han dukket opp
304 på oppfinnerscenen etter titaner som Thomas Edison og Alexander Graham
305 Bell. Alle hans bidrag på området radioteknologi gjør han til kanskje den
306 viktigste av alle enkeltoppfinnere i de første femti årene av radio. Han
307 var bedre utdannet enn Michael Faraday, som var bokbinderlærling da han
308 oppdaget elektrisk induksjon i
1831. Men han hadde like god intuisjon om
309 hvordan radioverden virket, og ved minst tre anledninger, fant Armstrong opp
310 svært viktig teknologier som brakte vår forståelse av radio et hopp videre.
311 <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2581956"></a> <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2581964"></a> <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2581970"></a>
313 Dagen etter julaften i
1933, ble fire patenter utstedt til Armstrong for
314 hans mest signifikante oppfinnelse
—FM-radio. Inntil da hadde
315 forbrukerradioer vært amplitude-modulert (AM) radio. Tidens teoretikere
316 hadde sagt at frekvens-modulert (FM) radio. De hadde rett når det gjelder
317 et smalt bånd av spektrumet. Men Armstrong oppdaget at frekvens-modulert
318 radio i et vidt bånd i spektrumet leverte en forbløffende gjengivelse av
319 lyd, med mye mindre senderstyrke og støy.
321 Den
5. november
1935 demonstrerte han teknologien på et møte hos institutt
322 for radioingeniører ved Empire State-bygningen i New York City. Han vred
323 radiosøkeren over en rekke AM-stasjoner, inntil radioen låste seg mot en
324 kringkasting som han hadde satt opp
27 kilometer unna. Radioen ble helt
325 stille, som om den var død, og så, med en klarhet ingen andre i rommet noen
326 gang hadde hørt fra et elektrisk apparat, produserte det lyden av en
327 opplesers stemme: "Dette er amatørstasjon W2AG ved Yonkers, New York, som
328 opererer på frekvensmodulering ved to og en halv meter."
330 Publikum hørte noe ingen hadde trodd var mulig:
331 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
332 Et glass vann ble fylt opp foran mikrofonen i Yonkers, og det hørtes ut som
333 et plass som ble fylt opp. . . . Et papir ble krøllet og revet opp, og det
334 hørtes ut som papir og ikke som en sprakende skogbrann. . . . Sousa-marsjer
335 ble spilt av fra plater og en pianosolo og et gitarnummer ble
336 utført. . . . Musikken ble presentert med en livaktighet som sjeldent om
337 noen gang før hadde vært hørt fra en radio-"musikk-boks".
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2527580" href=
"#ftn.id2527580" class=
"footnote">6</a>]
</sup>
338 </p></blockquote></div><p>
340 Som vår egen sunn fornuft forteller oss, hadde Armstrong oppdaget en mye
341 bedre radioteknologi. Men på tidspunktet for hans oppfinnelse, jobbet
342 Armstrong for RCA. RCA var den dominerende aktøren i det da dominerende
343 AM-radiomarkedet. I
1935 var det tusen radiostasjoner over hele USA, men
344 stasjonene i de store byene var alle eid av en liten håndfull selskaper.
347 Presidenten i RCA, David Sarnoff, en venn av Armstrong, var ivrig etter å få
348 Armstrong til å oppdage en måte å fjerne støyen fra AM-radio. Så Sarnoff var
349 ganske spent da Armstrong fortalte ham at han hadde en enhet som fjernet
350 støy fra "radio.". Men da Armstrong demonstrerte sin oppfinnelse, var ikke
351 Sarnoff fornøyd.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2527621"></a>
352 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
353 Jeg trodde Armstrong ville finne opp et slags filter for å fjerne skurring
354 fra AM-radioen vår. Jeg trodde ikke han skulle starte en revolusjon
—
355 starte en hel forbannet ny industri i konkurranse med RCA.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2581982" href=
"#ftn.id2581982" class=
"footnote">7</a>]
</sup>
356 </p></blockquote></div><p>
357 Armstrongs oppfinnelse truet RCAs AM-herredømme, så selskapet lanserte en
358 kampanje for å knuse FM-radio. Mens FM kan ha vært en overlegen teknologi,
359 var Sarnoff en overlegen taktiker. En forfatter beskrev det slik,
360 <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2527663"></a>
361 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
362 Kreftene til fordel for FM, i hovedsak ingeniørfaglige, kunne ikke overvinne
363 tyngden til strategien utviklet av avdelingene for salg, patenter og juss
364 for å undertrykke denne trusselen til selskapets posisjon. For FM utgjorde,
365 hvis det fikk utvikle seg uten begrensninger . . . en komplett endring i
366 maktforholdene rundt radio . . . og muligens fjerningen av det nøye
367 begrensede AM-systemet som var grunnlaget for RCA stigning til
368 makt.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2527687" href=
"#ftn.id2527687" class=
"footnote">8</a>]
</sup>
369 </p></blockquote></div><p>
370 RCA holdt først teknologien innomhus, og insistere på at det var nødvendig
371 med ytterligere tester. Da Armstrong, etter to år med testing, ble
372 utålmodig, begynte RCA å bruke sin makt hos myndighetene til holde tilbake
373 den generelle spredningen av FM-radio. I
1936, ansatte RCA den tidligere
374 lederen av FCC og ga ham oppgaven med å sikre at FCC tilordnet
375 radiospekteret på en måte som ville kastrere FM
—hovedsakelig ved å
376 flytte FM-radio til et annet band i spekteret. I første omgang lyktes ikke
377 disse forsøkene. Men mens Armstrong og nasjonen var distrahert av andre
378 verdenskrig, begynte RCAs arbeid å bære frukter. Like etter at krigen var
379 over, annonserte FCC et sett med avgjørelser som ville ha en klar effekt:
380 FM-radio ville bli forkrøplet.Lawrence lessing beskrevet det slik,
381 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
382 Serien med slag mot kroppen som FM-radio mottok rett etter krigen, i en
383 serie med avgjørelser manipulert gjennom FCC av de store radiointeressene,
384 var nesten utrolige i deres kraft og underfundighet.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2582292" href=
"#ftn.id2582292" class=
"footnote">9</a>]
</sup>
385 </p></blockquote></div><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2582332"></a><p>
386 For å gjøre plass i spektrumet for RCAs nyeste satsingsområde, televisjon,
387 skulle FM-radioens brukere flyttes til et helt nytt band i spektrumet.
388 Sendestyrken til FM-radioene ble også redusert, og gjorde at FM ikke lenger
389 kunne brukes for å sende programmer fra en del av landet til en annen.
390 (Denne endringen ble sterkt støttet av AT
&T, på grunn av at fjerningen
391 av FM-videresendingsstasjoner ville bety at radiostasjonene ville bli nødt
392 til å kjøpe kablede linker fra AT
&T.) Spredningen av FM-radio var
393 dermed kvalt, i hvert fall midlertidig.
395 Armstrong sto imot RCAs innsats. Som svar motsto RCA Armstrongs patenter.
396 Etter å ha bakt FM-teknologi inn i den nye standarden for TV, erklærte RCS
397 patentene ugyldige
—uten grunn og nesten femten år etter at de ble
398 utstedet. De nektet dermed å betale ham for bruken av patentene. I seks år
399 kjempet Armstrong en dyr søksmålskrig for å forsvare patentene sine. Til
400 slutt, samtidig som patentene utløp, tilbød RCA et forlik så lavt at det
401 ikke engang dekket Armstrongs advokatregning. Beseiret, knust og nå blakk,
402 skrev Armstrong i
1954 en kort beskjed til sin kone, før han gikk ut av et
403 vindu i trettende etasje og falt i døden.
406 Dette er slik loven virker noen ganger. Ikke ofte like tragisk, og sjelden
407 med heltemodig drama, men noen ganger er det slik det virker. Fra starten
408 har myndigheter og myndighetsorganer blitt tatt til fange. Det er mer
409 sannsynlig at de blir fanget når en mektig interesse er truet av enten en
410 juridisk eller teknologisk endring. Denne mektige interessen utøver for
411 ofte sin innflytelse hos myndighetene til å få myndighetene til å beskytte
412 den. Retorikken for denne beskyttelsen er naturligvis alltid med fokus på
413 fellesskapets beste. Realiteten er noe annet. Idéer som kan være solide
414 som fjell i en tidsalder, men som overlatt til seg selv, vil falle sammen i
415 en annen, er videreført gjennom denne subtile korrupsjonen i vår politiske
416 prosess. RCA hadde hva Causby-ene ikke hadde: Makten til å undertrykke
417 effekten av en teknologisk endring.
419 Det er ingen enkeltoppfinner av Internet. Ei heller er det en god dato som
420 kan brukes til å markere når det ble født. Likevel har internettet i løpet
421 av svært kort tid blitt en del av vanlige amerikaneres liv. I følge the Pew
422 Internet and American Life-prosjektet, har
58 prosent av amerikanerne hatt
423 tilgang til internettet i
2002, opp fra
49 prosent to år
424 tidligere.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2582412" href=
"#ftn.id2582412" class=
"footnote">10</a>]
</sup> Det tallet kan uten
425 problemer passere to tredjedeler av nasjonen ved utgangen av
2004.
427 Etter hvert som internett er blitt integrert inn i det vanlige liv har ting
428 blitt endret. Noen av disse endringene er teknisk
—internettet har
429 gjort kommunikasjon raskere, det har redusert kostnaden med å samle inn
430 data, og så videre. Disse tekniske endringene er ikke fokus for denne
431 boken. De er viktige. De er ikke godt forstått. Men de er den type ting
432 som ganske enkelt ville blir borte hvis vi alle bare slo av internettet. De
433 påvirker ikke folk som ikke bruker internettet, eller i det miste påvirker
434 det ikke dem direkte. De er et godt tema for en bok om internettet. Men
435 dette er ikke en bok om internettet.
437 I stedet er denne boken om effekten av internettet ut over internettet i seg
438 selv. En effekt på hvordan kultur blir skapt. Min påstand er at
439 internettet har ført til en viktig og ukjent endring i denne prosessen.
440 Denne endringen vil forandre en tradisjon som er like gammel som republikken
441 selv. De fleste, hvis de la merke til denne endringen, ville avvise den.
442 Men de fleste legger ikke engang merke til denne endringen som internettet
446 Vi kan få en følelse av denne endringen ved å skille mellom kommersiell og
447 ikke-kommersiell kultur, ved å knytte lovens reguleringer til hver av dem.
448 Med "kommersiell kultur" mener jeg den delen av vår kultur som er produsert
449 og solgt eller produsert for å bli solgt. Med "ikke-kommersiell kultur"
450 mener jeg alt det andre. Da gamle menn satt rundt i parker eller på
451 gatehjørner og fortalte historier som unger og andre lyttet til, så var det
452 ikke-kommersiell kultur. Da Noah Webster publiserte sin "Reader", eller
453 Joel Barlow sin poesi, så var det kommersiell kultur.
455 Fra historisk tid, og for omtrent hele vår tradisjon, har ikke-kommersiell
456 kultur i hovedsak ikke vært regulert. Selvfølgelig, hvis din historie var
457 utuktig, eller hvis dine sanger forstyrret freden, kunne loven gripe inn.
458 Men loven var aldri direkte interessert i skapingen eller spredningen av
459 denne form for kultur, og lot denne kulturen være "fri". Den vanlige måten
460 som vanlige individer delte og formet deres kultur
—historiefortelling,
461 formidling av scener fra teater eller TV, delta i fan-klubber, deling av
462 musikk, laging av kassetter
—ble ikke styrt av lovverket.
464 Fokuset på loven var kommersiell kreativitet. I starten forsiktig, etter
465 hvert betraktelig, beskytter loven insentivet til skaperne ved å tildele dem
466 en eksklusiv rett til deres kreative verker, slik at de kan selge disse
467 eksklusive rettighetene på en kommersiell markedsplass.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2582505" href=
"#ftn.id2582505" class=
"footnote">11</a>]
</sup> Dette er også, naturligvis, en viktig del av
468 kreativitet og kultur, og det har blitt en viktigere og viktigere del i
469 USA. Men det var på ingen måte dominerende i vår tradisjon. Det var i
470 stedet bare en del, en kontrollert del, balansert mot det frie.
472 Denne grove inndelingen mellom den frie og den kontrollerte har nå blitt
473 fjernet.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2582542" href=
"#ftn.id2582542" class=
"footnote">12</a>]
</sup> Internettet har satt scenen
474 for denne fjerningen, og pressen frem av store medieaktører har loven nå
475 påvirket det. For første gang i vår tradisjon, har de vanlige måtene som
476 individer skaper og deler kultur havnet innen rekekvidde for reguleringene
477 til loven, som har blitt utvidet til å dra inn i sitt kontrollområde den
478 enorme mengden kultur og kreativitet som den aldri tidligere har nådd over.
479 Teknologien som tok vare på den historiske balansen
—mellom bruken av
480 den delen av kulturen vår som var fri og bruken av vår kultur som krevde
481 tillatelse
—har blitt borte. Konsekvensen er at vi er mindre og mindre
482 en fri kultur, og mer og mer en tillatelseskultur.
484 Denne endringen blir rettferdiggjort som nødvendig for å beskytte
485 kommersiell kreativitet. Og ganske riktig, proteksjonisme er nøyaktig det
486 som motiverer endringen. Men proteksjonismen som rettferdiggjør endringene
487 som jeg skal beskrive lenger ned er ikke den begrensede og balanserte typen
488 som har definert loven tidligere. Dette er ikke en proteksjonisme for å
489 beskytte artister. Det er i stedet en proteksjonisme for å beskytte
490 bestemte forretningsformer. Selskaper som er truet av potensialet til
491 internettet for å endre måten både kommersiell og ikke-kommersiell kultur
492 blir skapt og delt, har samlet seg for å få lovgiverne til å bruke loven for
493 å beskytte selskapene. Dette er historien om RCA og Armstrong, og det er
494 drømmen til Causbyene.
496 For internettet har sluppet løs en ekstraordinær mulighet for mange til å
497 delta i prosessen med å bygge og kultivere en kultur som rekker lagt utenfor
498 lokale grenselinjer. Den makten har endret markedsplassen for å lage og
499 kultivere kultur generelt, og den endringen truer i neste omgang etablerte
500 innholdsindustrier. Internettet er dermed for industriene som bygget og
501 distribuerte innhold i det tjuende århundret hva FM-radio var for AM-radio,
502 eller hva traileren var for jernbaneindustrien i det nittende århundret:
503 begynnelsen på slutten, eller i hvert fall en markant endring. Digitale
504 teknologier, knyttet til internettet, kunne produsere et mye mer
505 konkurransedyktig og levende marked for å bygge og kultivere kultur. Dette
506 markedet kunne inneholde en mye videre og mer variert utvalg av skapere.
507 Disse skaperne kunne produsere og distribuere et mye mer levende utvalg av
508 kreativitet. Og avhengig av noen få viktige faktorer, så kunne disse
509 skaperne tjenere mer i snitt fra dette systemet enn skaperne gjør i
510 dag
—så lenge RCA-ene av i dag ikke bruker loven til å beskytte dem
511 selv mot denne konkurransen.
513 Likevel, som jeg argumenterer for i sidene som følger, er dette nøyaktig det
514 som skjer i vår kultur i dag. Dette som er dagens ekvivalenter til tidlig
515 tjuende århundres radio og nittende århundres jernbaner bruker deres makt
516 til å få loven til å beskytte dem mot dette nye, mer effektive, mer levende
517 teknologi for å bygge kultur. De lykkes i deres plan om å gjøre om
518 internettet før internettet gjør om på dem.
520 Det ser ikke slik ut for mange. Kamphandlingene over opphavsrett og
521 internettet er fjernt for de fleste. For de få som følger dem, virker de i
522 hovedsak å handle om et enklere sett med spørsmål
—hvorvidt
523 "piratvirksomhet" vil bli akseptert, og hvorvidt "eiendomsretten" vil bli
524 beskyttet. "Krigen" som har blitt erklært mot teknologiene til
525 internettet
—det presidenten for Motion Picture Association of America
526 (MPAA) Jack Valenti kaller sin "egen terroristkrig"
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2582670" href=
"#ftn.id2582670" class=
"footnote">13</a>]
</sup>—har blitt rammet inn som en kamp om å følge
527 loven og respektere eiendomsretten. For å vite hvilken side vi bør ta i
528 denne krigen, de fleste tenker at vi kun trenger å bestemme om hvorvidt vi
529 er for eiendomsrett eller mot den.
531 Hvis dette virkelig var alternativene, så ville jeg være enig med Jack
532 Valenti og innholdsindustrien. Jeg tror også på eiendomsretten, og spesielt
533 på viktigheten av hva Mr. Valenti så pent kaller "kreativ eiendomsrett".
534 Jeg tror at "piratvirksomhet" er galt, og at loven, riktig innstilt, bør
535 straffe "piratvirksomhet", både på og utenfor internettet.
537 Men disse enkle trosoppfatninger maskerer et mye mer grunnleggende spørsmål
538 og en mye mer dramatisk endring. Min frykt er at med mindre vi begynner å
539 legge merke til denne endringen, så vil krigen for å befri verden fra
540 internettets "pirater" også fjerne verdier fra vår kultur som har vært
541 integrert til vår tradisjon helt fra starten.
543 Disse verdiene bygget en tradisjon som, for i hvert fall de første
180 årene
544 av vår republikk, garanterte skaperne rettigheten til å bygge fritt på deres
545 fortid, og beskyttet skaperne og innovatørene fra både statlig og privat
546 kontroll. Det første grunnlovstillegget beskyttet skaperne fra statlig
547 kontroll. Og som professor Neil Netanel kraftfylt argumenterer,
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2582011" href=
"#ftn.id2582011" class=
"footnote">14</a>]
</sup> opphavsrettslov, skikkelig balansert, beskyttet
548 skaperne mot privat kontroll. Vår tradisjon var dermed hverken Sovjet eller
549 tradisjonen til velgjørere. I stedet skar det ut en bred manøvreringsrom
550 hvor skapere kunne kultivere og utvide vår kultur.
552 Likevel har lovens respons til internettet, når det knyttes sammen til
553 endringer i teknologien i internettet selv, ført til massiv økting av den
554 effektive reguleringen av kreativitet i USA. For å bygge på eller kritisere
555 kulturen rundt oss må en spørre, som Oliver Twist, om tillatelse først.
556 Tillatelse er, naturligvis, ofte innvilget
—men det er ikke ofte
557 innvilget til den kritiske eller den uavhengige. Vi har bygget en slags
558 kulturell adel. De innen dette adelskapet har et enkelt liv, mens de på
559 utsiden har det ikke. Men det er adelskap i alle former som er fremmed for
562 Historien som følger er om denne krigen. Er det ikke om "betydningen av
563 teknologi" i vanlig liv. Jeg tror ikke på guder, hverken digitale eller
564 andre typer. Det er heller ikke et forsøk på å demonisere noen individer
565 eller gruppe, jeg tro heller ikke i en djevel, selskapsmessig eller på annen
566 måte. Det er ikke en moralsk historie. Ei heller er det et rop om hellig
567 krig mot en industri.
569 Det er i stedet et forsøk på å forstå en håpløst ødeleggende krig som er
570 inspirert av teknologiene til internettet, men som rekker lang utenfor dens
571 kode. Og ved å forstå denne kampen er den en innsats for å finne veien til
572 fred. Det er ingen god grunn for å fortsette dagens batalje rundt
573 internett-teknologiene. Det vil være til stor skade for vår tradisjon og
574 kultur hvis den får lov til å fortsette ukontrollert. Vi må forstå kilden
575 til denne krigen. Vi må finne en løsning snart.
576 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2582095"></a><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2582100"></a><p>
577 Lik Causbyenes kamp er denne krigen, delvis, om "eiendomsrett". Eiendommen i
578 denne krigen er ikke like håndfast som den til Causbyene, og ingen uskyldige
579 kyllinger har så langt mistet livet. Likevel er idéene rundt denne
580 "eiendomsretten" like åpenbare for de fleste som Causbyenes krav om
581 ukrenkeligheten til deres bondegård var for dem. De fleste av oss tar for
582 gitt de uvanlig mektige krav som eierne av "immaterielle rettigheter" nå
583 hevder. De fleste av oss, som Causbyene, behandler disse kravene som
584 åpenbare. Og dermed protesterer vi, som Causbyene,, når ny teknologi griper
585 inn i denne eiendomsretten. Det er så klart for oss som det var fro dem at
586 de nye teknologiene til internettet "tar seg til rette" mot legitime krav
587 til "eiendomsrett". Det er like klart for oss som det var for dem at loven
588 skulle ta affære for å stoppe denne inntrengingen i annen manns eiendom.
589 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2582144"></a><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2582151"></a><p>
591 Og dermed, når nerder og teknologer forsvarer sin tids Armstrong og
592 Wright-brødenes teknologi, får de lite sympati fra de fleste av oss. Sunn
593 fornuft gjør ikke opprør. I motsetning til saken til de uheldige Causbyene,
594 er sunn fornuft på samme side som eiendomseierne i denne krigen. I
595 motsetning til hos de heldige Wright-brødrene, har internettet ikke
596 inspirert en revolusjon til fordel for seg.
598 Mitt håp er å skyve denne sunne fornuften videre. Jeg har blitt stadig mer
599 overrasket over kraften til denne idéen om immaterielle rettigheter og, mer
600 viktig, dets evne til å slå av kritisk tanke hos lovmakere og innbyggere.
601 Det har aldri før i vår historie vært så mye av vår "kultur" som har vært
602 "eid" enn det er nå. Og likevel har aldri før konsentrasjonen av makt til å
603 kontrollere
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>bruken
</em></span> av kulturen vært mer akseptert uten
604 spørsmål enn det er nå.
606 Gåten er, hvorfor det? Er det fordi vi fått en innsikt i sannheten om
607 verdien og betydningen av absolutt eierskap over idéer og kultur? Er det
608 fordi vi har oppdaget at vår tradisjon med å avvise slike absolutte krav var
611 Eller er det på grunn av at idéer om absolutt eierskap over idéer og kultur
612 gir fordeler til RCA-ene i vår tid, og passer med vår ureflekterte
615 Er denne radikale endringen vekk fra vår tradisjon om fri kultur en
616 forekomst av USA som korrigerer en feil fra sin fortid, slik vi gjorde det
617 etter en blodig krig mot slaveri, og slik vi sakte gjør det mot
618 forskjellsbehandling? Eller er denne radikale endringen vekk fra vår
619 tradisjon med fri kultur nok et eksempel på at vårt politiske system er
620 fanget av noen få mektige særinteresser?
622 Fører sunn fornuft til det ekstreme i dette spørsmålet på grunn av at sunn
623 fornuft faktisk tror på dette ekstreme? Eller står sunn fornuft i stillhet
624 i møtet med dette ekstreme fordi, som med Armstrong versus RCA, at den mer
625 mektige siden har sikret seg at det har et mye mer mektig synspunkt?
626 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2582242"></a><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2582248"></a><p>
628 Jeg forsøker ikke å være mystisk. Mine egne synspunkter er klare. Jeg mener
629 det var riktig for sunn fornuft å gjøre opprør mot ekstremismen til
630 Causbyene. Jeg mener det ville være riktig for sunn fornuft å gjøre opprør
631 mot de ekstreme krav som gjøres i dag på vegne av "immaterielle
632 rettigheter". Det som loven krever i dag er mer å mer like dumt som om
633 lensmannen skulle arrestere en flymaskin for å trenge inn på annen manns
634 eiendom. Men konsekvensene av den nye dumskapen vil bli mye mer
638 Basketaket som pågår akkurat nå senterer seg rundt to idéer:
639 "piratvirksomhet" og "eiendom". Mitt mål med denne bokens neste to deler er
640 å utforske disse to idéene.
642 Metoden min er ikke den vanlige metoden for en akademiker. Jeg ønsker ikke
643 å pløye deg inn i et komplisert argument, steinsatt med referanser til
644 obskure franske teoretikere
—uansett hvor naturlig det har blitt for
645 den rare sorten vi akademikere har blitt. Jeg vil i stedet begynne hver del
646 med en samling historier som etablerer en sammenheng der disse
647 tilsynelatende enkle idéene kan bli fullt ut forstått.
649 De to delene setter opp kjernen i påstanden til denne boken: at mens
650 internettet faktisk har produsert noe fantastisk og nytt, bidrar våre
651 myndigheter, presset av store medieaktører for å møte dette "noe nytt" til å
652 ødelegge noe som er svært gammelt. I stedet for å forstå endringene som
653 internettet kan gjøre mulig, og i stedet for å ta den tiden som trengs for å
654 la "sunn fornuft" finne ut hvordan best svare på utfordringen, så lar vi de
655 som er mest truet av endringene bruke sin makt til å endre loven
—og
656 viktigere, å bruke sin makt til å endre noe fundamentalt om hvordan vi
659 Jeg tror vi tillater dette, ikke fordi det er riktig, og heller ikke fordi
660 de fleste av oss tror på disse endringene. Vi tillater det på grunn av at
661 de interessene som er mest truet er blant de mest mektige aktørene i vår
662 deprimerende kompromitterte prosess for å utforme lover. Denne boken er
663 historien om nok en konsekvens for denne type korrupsjon
—en konsekvens
664 for de fleste av oss forblir ukjent med.
665 </p><div class=
"footnotes"><br><hr width=
"100" align=
"left"><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2528165" href=
"#id2528165" class=
"para">4</a>]
</sup>
666 St. George Tucker,
<em class=
"citetitle">Blackstone's Commentaries
</em> 3 (South
667 Hackensack, N.J.: Rothman Reprints,
1969),
18.
668 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2528277" href=
"#id2528277" class=
"para">5</a>]
</sup>
669 USA mot Causby, U.S.
328 (
1946):
256,
261. Domstolen fant at det kunne være
670 å "ta" hvis regjeringens bruk av sitt land reelt sett hadde ødelagt verdien
671 av eiendomen til Causby. Dette eksemplet ble foreslått for meg i Keith
672 Aokis flotte stykke, "(intellectual) Property and Sovereignty: Notes Toward
673 a cultural Geography of Authorship",
<em class=
"citetitle">Stanford Law
674 Review
</em> 48 (
1996):
1293,
1333. Se også Paul Goldstein,
675 <em class=
"citetitle">Real Property
</em> (Mineola, N.Y.: Foundation Press
676 (
1984)),
1112–13.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2528318"></a> <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2528305"></a>
677 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2527580" href=
"#id2527580" class=
"para">6</a>]
</sup>
678 Lawrence Lessing,
<em class=
"citetitle">Man of High Fidelity:: Edwin Howard
679 Armstrong
</em> (Philadelphia: J. B. Lipincott Company,
1956),
209.
680 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2581982" href=
"#id2581982" class=
"para">7</a>]
</sup> Se "Saints: The Heroes and Geniuses of the Electronic Era," første
681 elektroniske kirke i USA, hos www.webstationone.com/fecha, tilgjengelig fra
682 <a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
1</a>.
683 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2527687" href=
"#id2527687" class=
"para">8</a>]
</sup>Lessing,
226.
684 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2582292" href=
"#id2582292" class=
"para">9</a>]
</sup>
686 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2582412" href=
"#id2582412" class=
"para">10</a>]
</sup>
687 Amanda Lenhart, "The Ever-Shifting Internet Population: A New Look at
688 Internet Access and the Digital Divide," Pew Internet and American Life
689 Project,
15. april
2003:
6, tilgjengelig fra
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
2</a>.
690 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2582505" href=
"#id2582505" class=
"para">11</a>]
</sup>
691 Dette er ikke det eneste formålet med opphavsrett, men det er helt klart
692 hovedformålet med opphavsretten slik den er etablert i føderal grunnlov.
693 Opphavsrettslovene i delstatene beskyttet historisk ikke bare kommersielle
694 interesse når det gjalt publikasjoner, men også personverninteresser. Ved å
695 gi forfattere eneretten til å publisere først, ga delstatenes
696 opphavsrettslovene forfatterne makt til å kontrollere spredningen av fakta
697 om seg selv. Se Samuel D. Warren og Louis Brandeis, "The Right to Privacy",
698 Harvard Law Review
4 (
1890):
193,
198–200.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2528316"></a>
699 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2582542" href=
"#id2582542" class=
"para">12</a>]
</sup>
700 Se Jessica Litman,
<em class=
"citetitle">Digital Copyright
</em> (New York:
701 Prometheus bøker,
2001), kap.
13.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2582550"></a>
702 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2582670" href=
"#id2582670" class=
"para">13</a>]
</sup>
703 Amy Harmon, "Black Hawk Download: Moving Beyond Music, Pirates Use New Tools
704 to Turn the Net into an Illicit Video Club,"
<em class=
"citetitle">New York
705 Times
</em>,
17. januar
2002.
706 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2582011" href=
"#id2582011" class=
"para">14</a>]
</sup>
707 Neil W. Netanel, "Copyright and a Democratic Civil Society,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Yale
708 Law Journal
</em> 106 (
1996):
283.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2582021"></a>
709 </p></div></div></div><div class=
"part" title='Del I.
"Piratvirksomhet"'
><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h1 class=
"title"><a name=
"c-piracy"></a>Del I. "Piratvirksomhet"
</h1></div></div></div><div class=
"partintro" title='
"Piratvirksomhet"'
><div></div><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"idxmansfield1"></a><p>
710 Helt siden loven begynte å regulere kreative eierrettigheter, har det vært
711 en krig mot "piratvirksomhet". De presise konturene av dette konseptet,
712 "piratvirksomhet", har vært vanskelig å tegne opp, men bildet av
713 urettferdighet er enkelt å beskrive. Som Lord Mansfield skrev i en sak som
714 utvidet rekkevidden for engelsk opphavsrettslov til å inkludere noteark,
715 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
716 En person kan bruke kopien til å spille den, men han har ingen rett til å
717 robbe forfatteren for profitten, ved å lage flere kopier og distribuere
718 etter eget forgodtbefinnende.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2583384" href=
"#ftn.id2583384" class=
"footnote">15</a>]
</sup>
719 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2583398"></a></blockquote></div><p>
721 I dag er vi midt inne i en annen "krig" mot "piratvirksomhet". Internettet
722 har fremprovosert denne krigen. Internettet gjør det mulig å effektivt spre
723 innhold. Peer-to-peer (p2p) fildeling er blant det mest effektive av de
724 effektive teknologier internettet muliggjør. Ved å bruke distribuert
725 intelligens, kan p2p-systemer muliggjøre enkel spredning av innhold på en
726 måte som ingen forestilte seg for en generasjon siden.
729 Denne effektiviteten respekterer ikke de tradisjonelle skillene i
730 opphavsretten. Nettverket skiller ikke mellom deling av
731 opphavsrettsbeskyttet og ikke opphavsrettsbeskyttet innhold. Dermed har det
732 vært deling av en enorm mengde opphavsrettsbeskyttet innhold. Denne
733 delingen har i sin tur ansporet til krigen, på grunn av at eiere av
734 opphavsretter frykter delingen vil "frata forfatteren overskuddet."
736 Krigerne har snudd seg til domstolene, til lovgiverne, og i stadig større
737 grad til teknologi for å forsvare sin "eiendom" mot denne
738 "piratvirksomheten". En generasjon amerikanere, advarer krigerne, blir
739 oppdratt til å tro at "eiendom" skal være "gratis". Glem tatoveringer, ikke
740 tenk på kroppspiercing
—våre barn blir
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>tyver
</em></span>!
742 Det er ingen tvil om at "piratvirksomhet" er galt, og at pirater bør
743 straffes. Men før vi roper på bødlene, bør vi sette dette
744 "piratvirksomhets"-begrepet i en sammenheng. For mens begrepet blir mer og
745 mer brukt, har det i sin kjerne en ekstraordinær idé som nesten helt sikkert
748 Idéen høres omtrent slik ut:
749 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
750 Kreativt arbeid har verdi. Når jeg bruker, eller tar, eller bygger på det
751 kreative arbeidet til andre, så tar jeg noe fra dem som har verdi. Når jeg
752 tar noe av verdi fra noen andre, bør jeg få tillatelse fra dem. Å ta noe
753 som har verdi fra andre uten tillatelse er galt. Det er en form for
755 </p></blockquote></div><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2583497"></a><p>
756 Dette synet går dypt i de pågående debattene. Det er hva jussprofessor
757 Rochelle Dreyfuss ved NYU kritiserer som "hvis verdi, så rettighet"-teorien
758 for kreative eierrettigheter
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2583512" href=
"#ftn.id2583512" class=
"footnote">16</a>]
</sup>—hvis det finnes verdi, så må noen ha rettigheten til denne
759 verdien. Det er perspektivet som fikk komponistenes rettighetsorganisasjon,
760 ASCAP, til å saksøke jentespeiderne for å ikke betale for sangene som
761 jentene sagt rundt jentespeidernes leirbål.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2583532" href=
"#ftn.id2583532" class=
"footnote">17</a>]
</sup> Det fantes "verdi" (sangene), så det måtte ha vært en
762 "rettighet"
—til og med mot jentespeiderne.
763 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2583561"></a><p>
765 Denne idéen er helt klart en mulig forståelse om hvordan kreative
766 eierrettigheter bør virke. Det er helt klart et mulig design for et
767 lovsystem som beskytter kreative eierrettigheter. Men teorien om "hvis
768 verdi, så rettighet" for kreative eierrettigheter har aldri vært USAs teori
769 for kreative eierrettigheter. It har aldri stått rot i vårt lovverk.
771 I vår tradisjon har immaterielle rettigheter i stedet vært et instrument.
772 Det bygger fundamentet for et rikt kreativt samfunn, men er fortsatt servilt
773 til verdien av kreativitet. Dagens debatt har snudd dette helt rundt. Vi
774 har blitt så opptatt av å beskytte instrumentet at vi mister verdien av
777 Kilden til denne forvirringen er et skille som loven ikke lenger bryr seg om
778 å markere
—skillet mellom å gjenpublisere noens verk på den ene siden,
779 og bygge på og gjøre om verket på den andre. Da opphavsretten kom var det
780 kun publisering som ble berørt. Opphavsretten i dag regulerer begge.
782 Før teknologiene til internettet dukket opp, betød ikke denne begrepsmessige
783 sammenblandingen mye. Teknologiene for å publisere var kostbare, som betød
784 at det meste av publisering var kommersiell. Kommersielle aktører kunne
785 håndtere byrden pålagt av loven
—til og med byrden som den bysantiske
786 kompleksiteten som opphavsrettsloven har blitt. Det var bare nok en kostnad
787 ved å drive forretning.
788 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2583614"></a><p>
789 Men da internettet dukket opp, forsvant denne naturlige begresningen til
790 lovens virkeområde. Loven kontrollerer ikke bare kreativiteten til
791 kommersielle skapere, men effektivt sett kreativiteten til alle. Selv om
792 utvidelsen ikke ville bety stort hvis opphavsrettsloven kun regulerte
793 "kopiering", så betyr utvidelsen mye når loven regulerer så bredt og obskurt
794 som den gjør. Byrden denne loven gir oppveier nå langt fordelene den ga da
795 den ble vedtatt
—helt klart slik den påvirker ikke-kommersiell
796 kreativitet, og i stadig større grad slik den påvirker kommersiell
797 kreativitet. Dermed, slik vi ser klarere i kapittlene som følger, er lovens
798 rolle mindre og mindre å støtte kreativitet, og mer og mer å beskytte
799 enkelte industrier mot konkurranse. Akkurat på tidspunktet da digital
800 teknologi kunne sluppet løs en ekstraordinær mengde med kommersiell og
801 ikke-kommersiell kreativitet, tynger loven denne kreativiteten med sinnsykt
802 kompliserte og vage regler og med trusselen om uanstendig harde straffer.
803 Vi ser kanskje, som Richard Florida skriver, "Fremveksten av den kreative
804 klasse"
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2583623" href=
"#ftn.id2583623" class=
"footnote">18</a>]
</sup> Desverre ser vi også en
805 ekstraordinær fremvekst av reguleringer av denne kreative klassen.
807 Disse byrdene gir ingen mening i vår tradisjon. Vi bør begynne med å forstå
808 den tradisjonen litt mer, og ved å plassere dagens slag om oppførsel med
809 merkelappen "piratvirksomhet" i sin rette sammenheng.
810 </p><div class=
"toc"><p><b>Innholdsfortegnelse
</b></p><dl><dt><span class=
"chapter"><a href=
"#creators">2. Kapittel en: Skaperne
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"chapter"><a href=
"#mere-copyists">3. Kapittel to:
"Kun etter-apere"</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"chapter"><a href=
"#catalogs">4. Kapittel tre: Kataloger
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"chapter"><a href=
"#pirates">5. Kapittel fire:
"Pirater"</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#film">Film
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#recordedmusic">Innspilt musikk
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#radio">Radio
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#cabletv">Kabel-TV
</a></span></dt></dl></dd><dt><span class=
"chapter"><a href=
"#piracy">6. Kapittel fem:
"Piratvirksomhet"</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#piracy-i">Piracy I
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#piracy-ii">Piracy II
</a></span></dt></dl></dd></dl></div><div class=
"footnotes"><br><hr width=
"100" align=
"left"><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2583384" href=
"#id2583384" class=
"para">15</a>]
</sup>
813 <em class=
"citetitle">Bach
</em> v.
<em class=
"citetitle">Longman
</em>,
98
814 Eng. Rep.
1274 (
1777) (Mansfield).
815 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2583512" href=
"#id2583512" class=
"para">16</a>]
</sup>
818 Se Rochelle Dreyfuss, "Expressive Genericity: Trademarks as Language in the
819 Pepsi Generation,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Notre Dame Law Review
</em> 65 (
1990):
821 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2583532" href=
"#id2583532" class=
"para">17</a>]
</sup>
823 Lisa Bannon, "The Birds May Sing, but Campers Can't Unless They Pay Up,"
824 <em class=
"citetitle">Wall Street Journal
</em>,
21. august
1996, tilgjengelig
825 fra
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
3</a>; Jonathan
826 Zittrain, "Calling Off the Copyright War: In Battle of Property vs. Free
827 Speech, No One Wins,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Boston Globe
</em>,
24. november
828 2002.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2583550"></a>
829 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2583623" href=
"#id2583623" class=
"para">18</a>]
</sup>
831 I
<em class=
"citetitle">The Rise of the Creative Class
</em> (New York: Basic
832 Books,
2002), dokumenterer Richard Florida en endring i arbeidsstokken mot
833 kreativitetsarbeide. Hans tekst omhandler derimot ikke direkte de juridiske
834 vilkår som kreativiteten blir muliggjort eller hindret under. Jeg er helt
835 klart enig med ham i viktigheten og betydningen av denne endringen, men jeg
836 tror også at vilkårene som disse endringene blir aktivert under er mye
837 vanskeligere.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2583687"></a>
838 </p></div></div></div><div class=
"chapter" title=
"Kapittel 2. Kapittel en: Skaperne"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h2 class=
"title"><a name=
"creators"></a>Kapittel
2. Kapittel en: Skaperne
</h2></div></div></div><p>
839 I
1928 ble en tegnefilmfigur født. En tidlig Mikke Mus debuterte i mai
840 dette året, i en stille flopp ved navn
<em class=
"citetitle">Plane Crazy
</em>.
841 I november, i Colony teateret i New York City, ble den første vidt
842 distribuerte tegnefilmen med synkronisert lyd,
<em class=
"citetitle">Steamboat
843 Willy
</em>, vist frem med figuren som skulle bli til Mikke Mus.
845 Film med sykronisert lyd hadde blitt introdusert et år tidligere i filmen
846 <em class=
"citetitle">The Jazz Singer
</em>. Suksessen fikk Walt Disney til å
847 kopiere teknikken og mikse lyd med tegnefilm. Ingen visste hvorvidt det
848 ville virke eller ikke, og om det fungere, hvorvidt publikum villa ha sans
849 for det. Men da Disney gjorde en test sommeren
1928, var resutlatet
850 entydig. Som Disney beskriver dette første eksperimentet,
851 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
853 Et par av guttene mine kunne lese noteark, og en av dem kunne spille
854 munnspill. Vi stappet dem inn i et rom hvor de ikke kunne se skjermen, og
855 gjorde det slik at lyden de spilte ble sendt videre til et rom hvor våre
856 koner og venner var plassert for å se på bildet.
859 Guttene brukte et note- og lydeffekt-ark. Etter noen dårlige oppstarter,
860 kom endelig lyd og handlig i gang med et smell. Munnspilleren spilte
861 melodien, og resten av oss i lydavdelingen slamret på tinnkasseroller og
862 blåste på slide-fløyte til rytmen. Synkroniseringen var nesten helt riktig.
864 Effekten på vårt lille publikum var intet mindre enn elektrisk. De reagerte
865 nesten instiktivt til denne union av lyd og bevegelse. Jeg trodde de tullet
866 med meg. Så de puttet meg i publikum og satte igang på nytt. Det var
867 grufult, men det var fantastisk. Og det var noe nytt!
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2583802" href=
"#ftn.id2583802" class=
"footnote">19</a>]
</sup>
868 </p></blockquote></div><p>
869 Disneys daværende partner, og en av animasjonsverdenens mest ekstraordinære
870 talenter, Ub Iwerks, uttalte det sterkere: "Jeg har aldri vært så begeistret
871 i hele mitt liv. Ingenting annet har noen sinne vært like bra."
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2583824"></a>
873 Disney hadde laget noe helt nyt, basert på noe relativt nytt. Synkronisert
874 lyd ga liv til en form for kreativitet som sjeldent hadde
—unntatt fra
875 Disneys hender
—vært noe annet en fyllstoff for andre filmer. Gjennom
876 animasjonens tidligere historie var det Disneys oppfinnelse som satte
877 standarden som andre måtte sloss for å oppfylle. Og ganske ofte var Disneys
878 store geni, hans gnist av kreativitet, bygget på arbeidet til andre.
880 Dette er kjent stoff. Det du kanskje ikke vet er at
1928 også markerer en
881 annen viktig overgang. I samme år laget et komedie-geni (i motsetning til
882 tegnefilm-geni) sin siste uavhengig produserte stumfilm. Dette geniet var
883 Buster Keaton. Filmen var
<em class=
"citetitle">Steamboat Bill, Jr
</em>.
885 Keaton ble født inn i en vauderville-familie i
1895. I stumfilm-æraen hadde
886 han mestret bruken av bredpenslet fysisk komedie på en måte som tente
887 ukontrollerbar latter fra hans publikum.
<em class=
"citetitle">Steamboat Bill,
888 Jr
</em>. var en klassiker av denne typen, berømt blant film-elskere
889 for sine utrolige stunts. Filmen var en klassisk Keaton
—fantastisk
890 populær og blant de beste i sin sjanger.
892 <em class=
"citetitle">Steamboat Bill, Jr
</em>. kom før Disneys tegnefilm
893 Steamboat Willie. Det er ingen tilfeldighet at titlene er så
894 like. Steamboat Willie er en direkte tegneserieparodi av Steamboat
895 Bill,
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2583896" href=
"#ftn.id2583896" class=
"footnote">20</a>]
</sup> og begge bygger på en felles sang
896 som kilde. Det er ikke kun fra nyskapningen med synkronisert lyd i
897 <em class=
"citetitle">The Jazz Singer
</em> at vi får
<em class=
"citetitle">Steamboat
898 Willie
</em>. Det er også fra Buster Keatons nyskapning Steamboat
899 Bill, Jr., som igjen var inspirert av sangen "Steamboat Bill", at vi får
900 Steamboat Willie. Og fra Steamboat Willie får vi så Mikke Mus.
902 Denne "låningen" var ikke unik, hverken for Disney eller for industrien.
903 Disney apet alltid etter full-lengde massemarkedsfilmene rundt
904 ham.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2583949" href=
"#ftn.id2583949" class=
"footnote">21</a>]
</sup> Det samme gjorde mange andre.
905 Tidlige tegnefilmer er stappfulle av etterapninger
—små variasjoner
906 over suksessfulle temaer, gamle historier fortalt på nytt. Nøkkelen til
907 suksess var brilliansen i forskjellene. Med Disney var det lyden som ga
908 gnisten til hans animasjoner. Senere var det kvaliteten på hans arbeide
909 relativt til de masseproduserte tegnefilmene som han konkurrerte med.
910 Likevel var disse bidragene bygget på toppen av fundamentet som var lånt.
911 Disney bygget på arbeidet til andre som kom før han, og skapte noe nytt ut
912 av noe som bare var litt gammelt.
914 Noen ganger var låningen begrenset, og noen ganger var den betydelig. Tenkt
915 på eventurene til brødrene Grimm. Hvis du er like ubevisst som jeg var, så
916 tror du sannsynlighvis at disse fortellingene er glade, søte historier som
917 passer for ethvert barn ved leggetid. Realiteten er at Grimm-eventyrene er,
918 for oss, ganske dystre. Det er noen sjeldne og kanskje spesielt ambisiøse
919 foreldre som ville våge å lese disse blodige moralistiske historiene til
920 sine barn, ved leggetid eller hvilken som helst annet tidspunkt.
923 Disney tok disse historiene og fortalte dem på nytt på en måte som førte dem
924 inn i en ny tidsalder. Han ga historiene liv, med både karakterer og
925 lys. Uten å fjerne bitene av frykt og fare helt, gjorde han morsomt det som
926 var mørkt og satte inn en ekte følelse av medfølelse der det før var
927 frykt. Og ikke bare med verkene av brødrene Grimm. Faktisk er katalogen
928 over Disney-arbeid som baserer seg på arbeidet til andre ganske forbløffende
929 når den blir samlet:
<em class=
"citetitle">Snøhvit
</em> (
1937),
930 <em class=
"citetitle">Fantasia
</em> (
1940),
<em class=
"citetitle">Pinocchio
</em>
931 (
1940),
<em class=
"citetitle">Dumbo
</em> (
1941),
<em class=
"citetitle">Bambi
</em>
932 (
1942),
<em class=
"citetitle">Song of the South
</em> (
1946),
933 <em class=
"citetitle">Askepott
</em> (
1950),
<em class=
"citetitle">Alice in
934 Wonderland
</em> (
1951),
<em class=
"citetitle">Robin Hood
</em> (
1952),
935 <em class=
"citetitle">Peter Pan
</em> (
1953),
<em class=
"citetitle">Lady og
936 landstrykeren
</em> (
1955),
<em class=
"citetitle">Mulan
</em> (
1998),
937 <em class=
"citetitle">Tornerose
</em> (
1959),
<em class=
"citetitle">101
938 dalmatinere
</em> (
1961),
<em class=
"citetitle">Sverdet i steinen
</em>
939 (
1963), og
<em class=
"citetitle">Jungelboken
</em> (
1967)
—for ikke å nevne
940 et nylig eksempel som vi bør kanskje glemme raskt,
<em class=
"citetitle">Treasure
941 Planet
</em> (
2003). I alle disse tilfellene, har Disney (eller
942 Disney, Inc.) hentet kreativitet fra kultur rundt ham, blandet med
943 kreativiteten fra sitt eget ekstraordinære talent, og deretter brent denne
944 blandingen inn i sjelen til sin kultur. Hente, blande og brenne.
946 Dette er en type kreativitet. Det er en kreativitet som vi bør huske på og
947 feire. Det er noen som vil si at det finnes ingen kreativitet bortsett fra
948 denne typen. Vi trenger ikke gå så langt for å anerkjenne dens betydning.
949 Vi kan kalle dette "Disney-kreativitet", selv om det vil være litt
950 misvisende. Det er mer presist "Walt Disney-kreativitet"
—en
951 uttrykksform og genialitet som bygger på kulturen rundt oss og omformer den
953 </p><p> In
1928, the culture that Disney was free to draw upon was relatively
954 fresh. The public domain in
1928 was not very old and was therefore quite
955 vibrant. The average term of copyright was just around thirty
956 years
—for that minority of creative work that was in fact
957 copyrighted.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2584091" href=
"#ftn.id2584091" class=
"footnote">22</a>]
</sup> That means that for thirty
958 years, on average, the authors or copyright holders of a creative work had
959 an "exclusive right" to control certain uses of the work. To use this
960 copyrighted work in limited ways required the permission of the copyright
963 Når opphavsrettens vernetid er over, faller et verk i det fri og blir
964 allemannseie. Ingen tillatelse trengs da for å bygge på eller bruke dette
965 verket. Ingen tillatelse og dermed, ingen advokater. Allemannseie er en
966 "advokat-fri sone". Det meste av innhold fra det nittende århundre var
967 dermed fritt tilgjengelig for Disney å bruke eller bygge på i
1928. Det var
968 tilgjengelig for enhver
—uansett om de hadde forbindelser eller ikke,
969 om de var rik eller ikke, om de var akseptert eller ikke
—til å bruke
973 Dette er slik det alltid har vært
—inntil ganske nylig. For
974 mesteparten av vår historie, har allemannseiet vært like over horisonten.
975 Fram til
1978 var den gjennomsnittelige opphavsrettslige vernetiden aldri
976 mer enn trettito år, som gjorde at det meste av kultur fra en og en halv
977 generasjon tidligere var tilgjengelig for enhver å bygge på uten tillatelse
978 fra noen. Tilsvarende for i dag ville være at kreative verker fra
1960- ot
979 1970-tallet nå ville være fritt tilgjengelig for de neste Walt Disney å
980 bygge på uten tillatelse. Men i dag er allemannseie presumtivt kun for
981 innhold fra før mellomkrigstiden.
983 Walt Disney hadde selvfølgelig ikke monopol på "Walt Disney-kreativitet".
984 Det har heller ikke USA. Normen med fri kultur har, inntil nylig, og
985 unntatt i totalitære nasjoner, vært bredt utnyttet og svært universell.
987 Vurder for eksempel en form for kreativitet som synes underlig for mange
988 amerikanere, men som er overalt i japansk kultur:
989 <em class=
"citetitle">manga
</em>, eller tegneserier. Japanerne er fanatiske når
990 det gjelder tegneserier. Over
40 prosent av publikasjoner er tegneserier,
991 og
30 prosent av publikasjonsomsetningen stammer fra tegneserier. De er
992 over alt i det japanske samfunnet, tilgjengelig fra ethver
993 tidsskriftsutsalg, og i hendene på en stor andel av pendlere på Japans
994 ekstraordinære system for offentlig transport.
996 Amerikanere har en tendens til å se ned på denne formen for kultur. Det er
997 et lite attraktivt kjennetegn hos oss. Vi misforstår sansynligvis mye rundt
998 manga, pgå grunn av at få av oss noen gang har lest noe som ligner på
999 historiene i disse "grafiske historiene" forteller. For en japaner dekker
1000 manga ethvert aspekt ved det sosiale liv. For oss er tegneserier "menn i
1001 strømpebukser". Og uansett er det ikke slik at T-banen i New York er full
1002 av folk som leser Joyse eller Hemingway for den saks skyld. Folk i ulike
1003 kulturer skiller seg ut på forskjellig måter, og japanerne på dette
1006 Men mitt formål her er ikke å forstå manga. Det er å beskrive en variant av
1007 manga som fra en advokats perspektiv er ganske merkelig, men som fra en
1008 Disneys perspektiv er ganske godt kjent.
1011 Dette er fenomenet
<em class=
"citetitle">doujinshi
</em>. Doujinshi er også
1012 tegneserier, men de er slags etterapings-tegneserier. En rik etikk styrer
1013 de som skaper doujinshi. Det er ikke doujinshi hvis det
1014 <span class=
"emphasis"><em>bare
</em></span> er en kopi. Kunstneren må gjøre et bidrag til
1015 kunsten han kopierer ved å omforme det entet subtilt eller betydelig. En
1016 doujinshi-tegneserie kan dermed ta en massemarkeds-tegneserie og utvikle den
1017 i en annen retning
—med en annen historie-linje. Eller tegneserien kan
1018 beholde figuren som seg selv men endre litt på utseendet. Det er ingen
1019 bestemt formel for hva som gjør en doujinshi tilstrekkelig "forskjellig".
1020 Men de må være forskjellige hvis de skal anses som ekte doujinshi. Det er
1021 faktisk komiteer som går igjennom doujinshi for å bli med på messer, og
1022 avviser etterapninger som bare er en kopi.
1024 Disse etterapings-tegneseriene er ikke en liten del av manga-markedet. Det
1025 er enorme. Mer en
33 000 "sirkler" av skapere over hele Japan som
1026 produserer disse bitene av Walt Disney-kreativitet. Mer en
450 000
1027 japanesere samles to ganger i året, i den største offentlige samlingen i
1028 langet, for å bytte og selge dem. Dette markedet er parallellt med det
1029 kommersielle massemarkeds-manga-markedet. På noen måter konkurrerer det
1030 åpenbart med det markedet, men det er ingen vedvarende innsats fra de som
1031 kontrollerer det kommersielle manga-markedet for å stenge
1032 doujinshi-markedet. Det blostrer, på tross av konkurransen og til tross for
1035 Den mest gåtefulle egenskapen med doujinshi-markedet, for de som har
1036 juridisk trening i hvert fall, er at det overhodet tillates å eksistere.
1037 Under japansk opphavsrettslov, som i hvert fall på dette området (på
1038 papiret) speiler USAs opphavsrettslov, er doujinshi-markedet ulovlig.
1039 Doujinshi er helt klart "avledede verk". Det er ingen generell praksis hos
1040 doujinshi-kunstnere for å sikre seg tillatelse hos manga-skaperne. I stedet
1041 er praksisen ganske enkelt å ta og endre det andre har laget, slik Walt
1042 Disney gjorde med
<em class=
"citetitle">Steamboat Bill, Jr
</em>. For både
1043 japansk og USAs lov, er å "ta" uten tillatelse fra den opprinnelige
1044 opphavsrettsinnehaver ulovlig. Det er et brudd på opphavsretten til det
1045 opprinnelige verket å lage en kopi eller et avledet verk uten tillatelse fra
1046 den opprinnelige rettighetsinnehaveren.
1047 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"idxwinickjudd"></a><p>
1048 Likevel eksisterer dette illegale markedet og faktisk blomstrer i Japan, og
1049 etter manges syn er det nettopp fordi det eksisterer at japansk manga
1050 blomstrer. Som USAs tegneserieskaper Judd Winick fortalte meg, "I
1051 amerikansk tegneseriers første dager var det ganske likt det som foregår i
1052 Japan i dag. . . . Amerikanske tegneserier kom til verden ved å kopiere
1053 hverandre. . . . Det er slik [kunstnerne] lærer å tegne
—ved å se i
1054 tegneseriebøker og ikke følge streken, men ved å se på dem og kopiere dem"
1055 og bygge basert på dem.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2584256" href=
"#ftn.id2584256" class=
"footnote">23</a>]
</sup>
1057 Amerikanske tegneserier nå er ganske annerledes, forklarer Winick, delvis på
1058 grunn av de juridiske problemene med å tilpasse tegneserier slik doujinshi
1059 får lov til. Med for eksempel Supermann, fortalte Winick meg, "er det en
1060 rekke regler, og du må følge dem". Det er ting som Supermann "ikke kan"
1061 gjøre. "For en som lager tegneserier er det frustrerende å måtte begrense
1062 seg til noen parameter som er femti år gamle."
1063 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2584381"></a><p>
1064 The norm in Japan mitigates this legal difficulty. Some say it is precisely
1065 the benefit accruing to the Japanese manga market that explains the
1066 mitigation. Temple University law professor Salil Mehra, for example,
1067 hypothesizes that the manga market accepts these technical violations
1068 because they spur the manga market to be more wealthy and
1069 productive. Everyone would be worse off if doujinshi were banned, so the law
1070 does not ban doujinshi.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2584406" href=
"#ftn.id2584406" class=
"footnote">24</a>]
</sup>
1072 The problem with this story, however, as Mehra plainly acknowledges, is that
1073 the mechanism producing this laissez faire response is not clear. It may
1074 well be that the market as a whole is better off if doujinshi are permitted
1075 rather than banned, but that doesn't explain why individual copyright owners
1076 don't sue nonetheless. If the law has no general exception for doujinshi,
1077 and indeed in some cases individual manga artists have sued doujinshi
1078 artists, why is there not a more general pattern of blocking this "free
1079 taking" by the doujinshi culture?
1081 Jeg var fire nydelige måneder i Japan, og jeg stillte dette spørsmål så ofte
1082 som jeg kunne. Kanskje det beste svaret til slutt kom fra en venn i et
1083 større japansk advokatfirma. "Vi har ikke nok advokater", fortalte han meg
1084 en ettermiddag. Det er "bare ikke nok ressurser til å tiltale tilfeller som
1088 This is a theme to which we will return: that regulation by law is a
1089 function of both the words on the books and the costs of making those words
1090 have effect. For now, focus on the obvious question that is begged: Would
1091 Japan be better off with more lawyers? Would manga be richer if doujinshi
1092 artists were regularly prosecuted? Would the Japanese gain something
1093 important if they could end this practice of uncompensated sharing? Does
1094 piracy here hurt the victims of the piracy, or does it help them? Would
1095 lawyers fighting this piracy help their clients or hurt them? Let's pause
1098 Hvis du er som meg et tiår tilbake, eller som folk flest når de først
1099 begynner å tenke på disse temaene, da bør du omtrent nå være rådvill om noe
1100 du ikke hadde tenkt igjennom før.
1102 We live in a world that celebrates "property." I am one of those
1103 celebrants. I believe in the value of property in general, and I also
1104 believe in the value of that weird form of property that lawyers call
1105 "intellectual property."
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2584483" href=
"#ftn.id2584483" class=
"footnote">25</a>]
</sup> A large,
1106 diverse society cannot survive without property; a large, diverse, and
1107 modern society cannot flourish without intellectual property.
1109 But it takes just a second's reflection to realize that there is plenty of
1110 value out there that "property" doesn't capture. I don't mean "money can't
1111 buy you love," but rather, value that is plainly part of a process of
1112 production, including commercial as well as noncommercial production. If
1113 Disney animators had stolen a set of pencils to draw Steamboat Willie, we'd
1114 have no hesitation in condemning that taking as wrong
— even though
1115 trivial, even if unnoticed. Yet there was nothing wrong, at least under the
1116 law of the day, with Disney's taking from Buster Keaton or from the Brothers
1117 Grimm. There was nothing wrong with the taking from Keaton because Disney's
1118 use would have been considered "fair." There was nothing wrong with the
1119 taking from the Grimms because the Grimms' work was in the public domain.
1122 Dermed, selv om de tingene som Disney tok
—eller mer generellt, tingene
1123 som blir tatt av enhver som utøver Walt Disney-kreativitet
—er
1124 verdifulle, så anser ikke vår tradisjon det som galt å ta disse tingene.
1125 Noen ting forblir frie til å bli tatt i en fri kultur og denne friheten er
1128 The same with the doujinshi culture. If a doujinshi artist broke into a
1129 publisher's office and ran off with a thousand copies of his latest
1130 work
—or even one copy
—without paying, we'd have no hesitation in
1131 saying the artist was wrong. In addition to having trespassed, he would have
1132 stolen something of value. The law bans that stealing in whatever form,
1133 whether large or small.
1135 Yet there is an obvious reluctance, even among Japanese lawyers, to say that
1136 the copycat comic artists are "stealing." This form of Walt Disney
1137 creativity is seen as fair and right, even if lawyers in particular find it
1140 It's the same with a thousand examples that appear everywhere once you begin
1141 to look. Scientists build upon the work of other scientists without asking
1142 or paying for the privilege. ("Excuse me, Professor Einstein, but may I have
1143 permission to use your theory of relativity to show that you were wrong
1144 about quantum physics?") Acting companies perform adaptations of the works
1145 of Shakespeare without securing permission from anyone. (Does
1146 <span class=
"emphasis"><em>anyone
</em></span> believe Shakespeare would be better spread
1147 within our culture if there were a central Shakespeare rights clearinghouse
1148 that all productions of Shakespeare must appeal to first?) And Hollywood
1149 goes through cycles with a certain kind of movie: five asteroid films in the
1150 late
1990s; two volcano disaster films in
1997.
1153 Creators here and everywhere are always and at all times building upon the
1154 creativity that went before and that surrounds them now. That building is
1155 always and everywhere at least partially done without permission and without
1156 compensating the original creator. No society, free or controlled, has ever
1157 demanded that every use be paid for or that permission for Walt Disney
1158 creativity must always be sought. Instead, every society has left a certain
1159 bit of its culture free for the taking
—free societies more fully than
1160 unfree, perhaps, but all societies to some degree.
1163 The hard question is therefore not
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>whether
</em></span> a culture is
1164 free. All cultures are free to some degree. The hard question instead is
1165 "
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>How
</em></span> free is this culture?" How much, and how broadly,
1166 is the culture free for others to take and build upon? Is that freedom
1167 limited to party members? To members of the royal family? To the top ten
1168 corporations on the New York Stock Exchange? Or is that freedom spread
1169 broadly? To artists generally, whether affiliated with the Met or not? To
1170 musicians generally, whether white or not? To filmmakers generally, whether
1171 affiliated with a studio or not?
1173 Frie kulturer er kulturer som etterlater mye åpent for andre å bygge på.
1174 Ufrie, eller tillatelse-kulturer etterlater mye mindre. Vår var en fri
1175 kultur. Den er på tur til å bli mindre fri.
1176 </p><div class=
"footnotes"><br><hr width=
"100" align=
"left"><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2583802" href=
"#id2583802" class=
"para">19</a>]
</sup>
1179 Leonard Maltin,
<em class=
"citetitle">Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated
1180 Cartoons
</em> (New York: Penguin Books,
1987),
34–35.
1181 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2583896" href=
"#id2583896" class=
"para">20</a>]
</sup>
1184 Jeg er takknemlig overfor David Gerstein og hans nøyaktige historie,
1185 beskrevet på
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
4</a>. I
1186 følge Dave Smith ved the Disney Archives, betalte Disney for å bruke
1187 musikken til fem sanger i
<em class=
"citetitle">Steamboat Willie
</em>:
1188 "Steamboat Bill," "The Simpleton" (Delille), "Mischief Makers" (Carbonara),
1189 "Joyful Hurry No.
1" (Baron), og "Gawky Rube" (Lakay). En sjette sang, "The
1190 Turkey in the Straw," var allerede allemannseie. Brev fra David Smith til
1191 Harry Surden,
10. juli
2003, tilgjenglig i arkivet til forfatteren.
1192 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2583949" href=
"#id2583949" class=
"para">21</a>]
</sup>
1195 Han var også tilhenger av allmannseiet. Se Chris Sprigman, "The Mouse that
1196 Ate the Public Domain," Findlaw,
5. mars
2002, fra
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
5</a>.
1197 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2584091" href=
"#id2584091" class=
"para">22</a>]
</sup>
1200 Inntil
1976 ga opphavsrettsloven en forfatter to mulige verneperioder: en
1201 initiell periode, og en fornyingsperiode. Jeg har beregnet
1202 "gjennomsnittelig" vernetid ved å finne vektet gjennomsnitt av de totale
1203 registreringer for et gitt år, og andelen fornyinger. Hvis
100
1204 opphavsretter ble registrert i år
1, bare
15 av dem ble fornyet, og
1205 fornyingsvernetiden er
28 år, så er gjennomsnittelig vernetid
32,
2
1206 år. Fornyingsdata og andre relevante data ligger på nettsidene tilknyttet
1207 denne boka, tilgjengelig fra
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link
1209 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2584256" href=
"#id2584256" class=
"para">23</a>]
</sup>
1212 For en utmerket historie, se Scott McCloud,
<em class=
"citetitle">Reinventing
1213 Comics
</em> (New York: Perennial,
2000).
1214 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2584406" href=
"#id2584406" class=
"para">24</a>]
</sup>
1217 See Salil K. Mehra, "Copyright and Comics in Japan: Does Law Explain Why All
1218 the Comics My Kid Watches Are Japanese Imports?"
<em class=
"citetitle">Rutgers Law
1219 Review
</em> 55 (
2002):
155,
182.
"[T]here might be a collective
1220 economic rationality that would lead manga and anime artists to forgo
1221 bringing legal actions for infringement. One hypothesis is that all manga
1222 artists may be better off collectively if they set aside their individual
1223 self-interest and decide not to press their legal rights. This is
1224 essentially a prisoner's dilemma solved."
1225 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2584483" href=
"#id2584483" class=
"para">25</a>]
</sup>
1227 The term
<em class=
"citetitle">intellectual property
</em> is of relatively
1228 recent origin. See Siva Vaidhyanathan,
<em class=
"citetitle">Copyrights and
1229 Copywrongs
</em>,
11 (New York: New York University Press,
2001). See
1230 also Lawrence Lessig,
<em class=
"citetitle">The Future of Ideas
</em> (New York:
1231 Random House,
2001),
293 n.
26. The term accurately describes a set of
1232 "property" rights
—copyright, patents, trademark, and
1233 trade-secret
—but the nature of those rights is very different.
1234 <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2584500"></a>
1235 </p></div></div></div><div class=
"chapter" title='Kapittel
3. Kapittel to:
"Kun etter-apere"'
><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h2 class=
"title"><a name=
"mere-copyists"></a>Kapittel
3. Kapittel to: "Kun etter-apere"
</h2></div></div></div><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2584641"></a><p>
1236 In
1839, Louis Daguerre invented the first practical technology for
1237 producing what we would call "photographs." Appropriately enough, they were
1238 called "daguerreotypes." The process was complicated and expensive, and the
1239 field was thus limited to professionals and a few zealous and wealthy
1240 amateurs. (There was even an American Daguerre Association that helped
1241 regulate the industry, as do all such associations, by keeping competition
1242 down so as to keep prices up.)
1244 Yet despite high prices, the demand for daguerreotypes was strong. This
1245 pushed inventors to find simpler and cheaper ways to make "automatic
1246 pictures." William Talbot soon discovered a process for making "negatives."
1247 But because the negatives were glass, and had to be kept wet, the process
1248 still remained expensive and cumbersome. In the
1870s, dry plates were
1249 developed, making it easier to separate the taking of a picture from its
1250 developing. These were still plates of glass, and thus it was still not a
1251 process within reach of most amateurs.
1252 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"idxeastmangeorge"></a><p>
1254 The technological change that made mass photography possible didn't happen
1255 until
1888, and was the creation of a single man. George Eastman, himself an
1256 amateur photographer, was frustrated by the technology of photographs made
1257 with plates. In a flash of insight (so to speak), Eastman saw that if the
1258 film could be made to be flexible, it could be held on a single
1259 spindle. That roll could then be sent to a developer, driving the costs of
1260 photography down substantially. By lowering the costs, Eastman expected he
1261 could dramatically broaden the population of photographers.
1263 Eastman developed flexible, emulsion-coated paper film and placed rolls of
1264 it in small, simple cameras: the Kodak. The device was marketed on the basis
1265 of its simplicity. "You press the button and we do the rest."
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2584712" href=
"#ftn.id2584712" class=
"footnote">26</a>]
</sup> As he described in
<em class=
"citetitle">The Kodak
1267 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
1268 The principle of the Kodak system is the separation of the work that any
1269 person whomsoever can do in making a photograph, from the work that only an
1270 expert can do. . . . We furnish anybody, man, woman or child, who has
1271 sufficient intelligence to point a box straight and press a button, with an
1272 instrument which altogether removes from the practice of photography the
1273 necessity for exceptional facilities or, in fact, any special knowledge of
1274 the art. It can be employed without preliminary study, without a darkroom
1275 and without chemicals.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2584740" href=
"#ftn.id2584740" class=
"footnote">27</a>]
</sup>
1276 </p></blockquote></div><p>
1277 For $
25, anyone could make pictures. The camera came preloaded with film,
1278 and when it had been used, the camera was returned to an Eastman factory,
1279 where the film was developed. Over time, of course, the cost of the camera
1280 and the ease with which it could be used both improved. Roll film thus
1281 became the basis for the explosive growth of popular photography. Eastman's
1282 camera first went on sale in
1888; one year later, Kodak was printing more
1283 than six thousand negatives a day. From
1888 through
1909, while industrial
1284 production was rising by
4.7 percent, photographic equipment and material
1285 sales increased by percent.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2584773" href=
"#ftn.id2584773" class=
"footnote">28</a>]
</sup> Eastman
1286 Kodak's sales during the same period experienced an average annual increase
1287 of over
17 percent.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2584781" href=
"#ftn.id2584781" class=
"footnote">29</a>]
</sup>
1288 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2584790"></a><p>
1291 The real significance of Eastman's invention, however, was not economic. It
1292 was social. Professional photography gave individuals a glimpse of places
1293 they would never otherwise see. Amateur photography gave them the ability to
1294 record their own lives in a way they had never been able to do before. As
1295 author Brian Coe notes, "For the first time the snapshot album provided the
1296 man on the street with a permanent record of his family and its
1297 activities. . . . For the first time in history there exists an authentic
1298 visual record of the appearance and activities of the common man made
1299 without [literary] interpretation or bias."
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2584820" href=
"#ftn.id2584820" class=
"footnote">30</a>]
</sup>
1301 In this way, the Kodak camera and film were technologies of expression. The
1302 pencil or paintbrush was also a technology of expression, of course. But it
1303 took years of training before they could be deployed by amateurs in any
1304 useful or effective way. With the Kodak, expression was possible much sooner
1305 and more simply. The barrier to expression was lowered. Snobs would sneer at
1306 its "quality"; professionals would discount it as irrelevant. But watch a
1307 child study how best to frame a picture and you get a sense of the
1308 experience of creativity that the Kodak enabled. Democratic tools gave
1309 ordinary people a way to express themselves more easily than any tools could
1312 What was required for this technology to flourish? Obviously, Eastman's
1313 genius was an important part. But also important was the legal environment
1314 within which Eastman's invention grew. For early in the history of
1315 photography, there was a series of judicial decisions that could well have
1316 changed the course of photography substantially. Courts were asked whether
1317 the photographer, amateur or professional, required permission before he
1318 could capture and print whatever image he wanted. Their answer was
1319 no.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2584855" href=
"#ftn.id2584855" class=
"footnote">31</a>]
</sup>
1322 The arguments in favor of requiring permission will sound surprisingly
1323 familiar. The photographer was "taking" something from the person or
1324 building whose photograph he shot
—pirating something of value. Some
1325 even thought he was taking the target's soul. Just as Disney was not free to
1326 take the pencils that his animators used to draw Mickey, so, too, should
1327 these photographers not be free to take images that they thought valuable.
1328 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2584888"></a><p>
1329 On the other side was an argument that should be familiar, as well. Sure,
1330 there may be something of value being used. But citizens should have the
1331 right to capture at least those images that stand in public view. (Louis
1332 Brandeis, who would become a Supreme Court Justice, thought the rule should
1333 be different for images from private spaces.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2584911" href=
"#ftn.id2584911" class=
"footnote">32</a>]
</sup>) It may be that this means that the photographer gets something for
1334 nothing. Just as Disney could take inspiration from
<em class=
"citetitle">Steamboat
1335 Bill, Jr
</em>. or the Brothers Grimm, the photographer should be free
1336 to capture an image without compensating the source.
1338 Fortunately for Mr. Eastman, and for photography in general, these early
1339 decisions went in favor of the pirates. In general, no permission would be
1340 required before an image could be captured and shared with others. Instead,
1341 permission was presumed. Freedom was the default. (The law would eventually
1342 craft an exception for famous people: commercial photographers who snap
1343 pictures of famous people for commercial purposes have more restrictions
1344 than the rest of us. But in the ordinary case, the image can be captured
1345 without clearing the rights to do the capturing.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2584956" href=
"#ftn.id2584956" class=
"footnote">33</a>]
</sup>)
1347 We can only speculate about how photography would have developed had the law
1348 gone the other way. If the presumption had been against the photographer,
1349 then the photographer would have had to demonstrate permission. Perhaps
1350 Eastman Kodak would have had to demonstrate permission, too, before it
1351 developed the film upon which images were captured. After all, if permission
1352 were not granted, then Eastman Kodak would be benefiting from the "theft"
1353 committed by the photographer. Just as Napster benefited from the copyright
1354 infringements committed by Napster users, Kodak would be benefiting from the
1355 "image-right" infringement of its photographers. We could imagine the law
1356 then requiring that some form of permission be demonstrated before a company
1357 developed pictures. We could imagine a system developing to demonstrate that
1363 But though we could imagine this system of permission, it would be very hard
1364 to see how photography could have flourished as it did if the requirement
1365 for permission had been built into the rules that govern it. Photography
1366 would have existed. It would have grown in importance over
1367 time. Professionals would have continued to use the technology as they
1368 did
—since professionals could have more easily borne the burdens of
1369 the permission system. But the spread of photography to ordinary people
1370 would not have occurred. Nothing like that growth would have been
1371 realized. And certainly, nothing like that growth in a democratic technology
1372 of expression would have been realized. If you drive through San
1373 Francisco's Presidio, you might see two gaudy yellow school buses painted
1374 over with colorful and striking images, and the logo "Just Think!" in place
1375 of the name of a school. But there's little that's "just" cerebral in the
1376 projects that these busses enable. These buses are filled with technologies
1377 that teach kids to tinker with film. Not the film of Eastman. Not even the
1378 film of your VCR. Rather the "film" of digital cameras. Just Think! is a
1379 project that enables kids to make films, as a way to understand and critique
1380 the filmed culture that they find all around them. Each year, these busses
1381 travel to more than thirty schools and enable three hundred to five hundred
1382 children to learn something about media by doing something with media. By
1383 doing, they think. By tinkering, they learn.
1384 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2585002"></a><p>
1385 These buses are not cheap, but the technology they carry is increasingly
1386 so. The cost of a high-quality digital video system has fallen
1387 dramatically. As one analyst puts it, "Five years ago, a good real-time
1388 digital video editing system cost $
25,
000. Today you can get professional
1389 quality for $
595."
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2585046" href=
"#ftn.id2585046" class=
"footnote">34</a>]
</sup> These buses are
1390 filled with technology that would have cost hundreds of thousands just ten
1391 years ago. And it is now feasible to imagine not just buses like this, but
1392 classrooms across the country where kids are learning more and more of
1393 something teachers call "media literacy."
1396 "Media literacy," as Dave Yanofsky, the executive director of Just Think!,
1397 puts it, "is the ability . . . to understand, analyze, and deconstruct media
1398 images. Its aim is to make [kids] literate about the way media works, the
1399 way it's constructed, the way it's delivered, and the way people access it."
1400 <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2585074"></a>
1402 This may seem like an odd way to think about "literacy." For most people,
1403 literacy is about reading and writing. Faulkner and Hemingway and noticing
1404 split infinitives are the things that "literate" people know about.
1406 Maybe. But in a world where children see on average
390 hours of television
1407 commercials per year, or between
20,
000 and
45,
000 commercials
1408 generally,
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2585096" href=
"#ftn.id2585096" class=
"footnote">35</a>]
</sup> it is increasingly important
1409 to understand the "grammar" of media. For just as there is a grammar for the
1410 written word, so, too, is there one for media. And just as kids learn how to
1411 write by writing lots of terrible prose, kids learn how to write media by
1412 constructing lots of (at least at first) terrible media.
1414 A growing field of academics and activists sees this form of literacy as
1415 crucial to the next generation of culture. For though anyone who has written
1416 understands how difficult writing is
—how difficult it is to sequence
1417 the story, to keep a reader's attention, to craft language to be
1418 understandable
—few of us have any real sense of how difficult media
1419 is. Or more fundamentally, few of us have a sense of how media works, how it
1420 holds an audience or leads it through a story, how it triggers emotion or
1423 It took filmmaking a generation before it could do these things well. But
1424 even then, the knowledge was in the filming, not in writing about the
1425 film. The skill came from experiencing the making of a film, not from
1426 reading a book about it. One learns to write by writing and then reflecting
1427 upon what one has written. One learns to write with images by making them
1428 and then reflecting upon what one has created.
1429 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2585139"></a><p>
1430 This grammar has changed as media has changed. When it was just film, as
1431 Elizabeth Daley, executive director of the University of Southern
1432 California's Annenberg Center for Communication and dean of the USC School
1433 of Cinema-Television, explained to me, the grammar was about "the placement
1434 of objects, color, . . . rhythm, pacing, and texture."
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2585154" href=
"#ftn.id2585154" class=
"footnote">36</a>]
</sup> But as computers open up an interactive space where
1435 a story is "played" as well as experienced, that grammar changes. The simple
1436 control of narrative is lost, and so other techniques are necessary. Author
1437 Michael Crichton had mastered the narrative of science fiction. But when he
1438 tried to design a computer game based on one of his works, it was a new
1439 craft he had to learn. How to lead people through a game without their
1440 feeling they have been led was not obvious, even to a wildly successful
1441 author.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2585186" href=
"#ftn.id2585186" class=
"footnote">37</a>]
</sup>
1442 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2585208"></a><p>
1443 This skill is precisely the craft a filmmaker learns. As Daley describes,
1444 "people are very surprised about how they are led through a film. [I]t is
1445 perfectly constructed to keep you from seeing it, so you have no idea. If a
1446 filmmaker succeeds you do not know how you were led." If you know you were
1447 led through a film, the film has failed.
1449 Yet the push for an expanded literacy
—one that goes beyond text to
1450 include audio and visual elements
—is not about making better film
1451 directors. The aim is not to improve the profession of filmmaking at all.
1452 Instead, as Daley explained,
1453 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
1454 From my perspective, probably the most important digital divide is not
1455 access to a box. It's the ability to be empowered with the language that
1456 that box works in. Otherwise only a very few people can write with this
1457 language, and all the rest of us are reduced to being read-only.
1458 </p></blockquote></div><p>
1459 "Skrivebeskyttet." Passive mottakerne av kultur produsert andre
1460 steder. Sofapoteter. Forbrukere. Dette er medieverden fra det tjuende
1463 The twenty-first century could be different. This is the crucial point: It
1464 could be both read and write. Or at least reading and better understanding
1465 the craft of writing. Or best, reading and understanding the tools that
1466 enable the writing to lead or mislead. The aim of any literacy, and this
1467 literacy in particular, is to "empower people to choose the appropriate
1468 language for what they need to create or express."
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2585265" href=
"#ftn.id2585265" class=
"footnote">38</a>]
</sup> It is to enable students "to communicate in the
1469 language of the twenty-first century."
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2585283" href=
"#ftn.id2585283" class=
"footnote">39</a>]
</sup>
1470 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2585291"></a><p>
1471 As with any language, this language comes more easily to some than to
1472 others. It doesn't necessarily come more easily to those who excel in
1473 written language. Daley and Stephanie Barish, director of the Institute for
1474 Multimedia Literacy at the Annenberg Center, describe one particularly
1475 poignant example of a project they ran in a high school. The high school
1476 was a very poor inner-city Los Angeles school. In all the traditional
1477 measures of success, this school was a failure. But Daley and Barish ran a
1478 program that gave kids an opportunity to use film to express meaning about
1479 something the students know something about
—gun violence.
1481 The class was held on Friday afternoons, and it created a relatively new
1482 problem for the school. While the challenge in most classes was getting the
1483 kids to come, the challenge in this class was keeping them away. The "kids
1484 were showing up at
6 A.M. and leaving at
5 at night," said Barish. They were
1485 working harder than in any other class to do what education should be
1486 about
—learning how to express themselves.
1488 Using whatever "free web stuff they could find," and relatively simple tools
1489 to enable the kids to mix "image, sound, and text," Barish said this class
1490 produced a series of projects that showed something about gun violence that
1491 few would otherwise understand. This was an issue close to the lives of
1492 these students. The project "gave them a tool and empowered them to be able
1493 to both understand it and talk about it," Barish explained. That tool
1494 succeeded in creating expression
—far more successfully and powerfully
1495 than could have been created using only text. "If you had said to these
1496 students, `you have to do it in text,' they would've just thrown their hands
1497 up and gone and done something else," Barish described, in part, no doubt,
1498 because expressing themselves in text is not something these students can do
1499 well. Yet neither is text a form in which
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>these
</em></span> ideas
1500 can be expressed well. The power of this message depended upon its
1501 connection to this form of expression.
1506 "But isn't education about teaching kids to write?" I asked. In part, of
1507 course, it is. But why are we teaching kids to write? Education, Daley
1508 explained, is about giving students a way of "constructing meaning." To say
1509 that that means just writing is like saying teaching writing is only about
1510 teaching kids how to spell. Text is one part
—and increasingly, not the
1511 most powerful part
—of constructing meaning. As Daley explained in the
1512 most moving part of our interview,
1513 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
1514 What you want is to give these students ways of constructing meaning. If all
1515 you give them is text, they're not going to do it. Because they can't. You
1516 know, you've got Johnny who can look at a video, he can play a video game,
1517 he can do graffiti all over your walls, he can take your car apart, and he
1518 can do all sorts of other things. He just can't read your text. So Johnny
1519 comes to school and you say, "Johnny, you're illiterate. Nothing you can do
1520 matters." Well, Johnny then has two choices: He can dismiss you or he [can]
1521 dismiss himself. If his ego is healthy at all, he's going to dismiss
1522 you. [But i]nstead, if you say, "Well, with all these things that you can
1523 do, let's talk about this issue. Play for me music that you think reflects
1524 that, or show me images that you think reflect that, or draw for me
1525 something that reflects that." Not by giving a kid a video camera and
1526 . . . saying, "Let's go have fun with the video camera and make a little
1527 movie." But instead, really help you take these elements that you
1528 understand, that are your language, and construct meaning about the
1531 That empowers enormously. And then what happens, of course, is eventually,
1532 as it has happened in all these classes, they bump up against the fact, "I
1533 need to explain this and I really need to write something." And as one of
1534 the teachers told Stephanie, they would rewrite a paragraph
5,
6,
7,
8
1535 times, till they got it right.
1538 Because they needed to. There was a reason for doing it. They needed to say
1539 something, as opposed to just jumping through your hoops. They actually
1540 needed to use a language that they didn't speak very well. But they had come
1541 to understand that they had a lot of power with this language."
1542 </p></blockquote></div><p>
1543 When two planes crashed into the World Trade Center, another into the
1544 Pentagon, and a fourth into a Pennsylvania field, all media around the world
1545 shifted to this news. Every moment of just about every day for that week,
1546 and for weeks after, television in particular, and media generally, retold
1547 the story of the events we had just witnessed. The telling was a retelling,
1548 because we had seen the events that were described. The genius of this awful
1549 act of terrorism was that the delayed second attack was perfectly timed to
1550 assure that the whole world would be watching.
1552 These retellings had an increasingly familiar feel. There was music scored
1553 for the intermissions, and fancy graphics that flashed across the
1554 screen. There was a formula to interviews. There was "balance," and
1555 seriousness. This was news choreographed in the way we have increasingly
1556 come to expect it, "news as entertainment," even if the entertainment is
1558 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2585425"></a><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2585431"></a><p>
1559 But in addition to this produced news about the "tragedy of September
11,"
1560 those of us tied to the Internet came to see a very different production as
1561 well. The Internet was filled with accounts of the same events. Yet these
1562 Internet accounts had a very different flavor. Some people constructed photo
1563 pages that captured images from around the world and presented them as slide
1564 shows with text. Some offered open letters. There were sound
1565 recordings. There was anger and frustration. There were attempts to provide
1566 context. There was, in short, an extraordinary worldwide barn raising, in
1567 the sense Mike Godwin uses the term in his book
<em class=
"citetitle">Cyber
1568 Rights
</em>, around a news event that had captured the attention of
1569 the world. There was ABC and CBS, but there was also the Internet.
1572 I don't mean simply to praise the Internet
—though I do think the
1573 people who supported this form of speech should be praised. I mean instead
1574 to point to a significance in this form of speech. For like a Kodak, the
1575 Internet enables people to capture images. And like in a movie by a student
1576 on the "Just Think!" bus, the visual images could be mixed with sound or
1579 But unlike any technology for simply capturing images, the Internet allows
1580 these creations to be shared with an extraordinary number of people,
1581 practically instantaneously. This is something new in our
1582 tradition
—not just that culture can be captured mechanically, and
1583 obviously not just that events are commented upon critically, but that this
1584 mix of captured images, sound, and commentary can be widely spread
1585 practically instantaneously.
1587 September
11 was not an aberration. It was a beginning. Around the same
1588 time, a form of communication that has grown dramatically was just beginning
1589 to come into public consciousness: the Web-log, or blog. The blog is a kind
1590 of public diary, and within some cultures, such as in Japan, it functions
1591 very much like a diary. In those cultures, it records private facts in a
1592 public way
—it's a kind of electronic
<em class=
"citetitle">Jerry
1593 Springer
</em>, available anywhere in the world.
1595 But in the United States, blogs have taken on a very different character.
1596 There are some who use the space simply to talk about their private
1597 life. But there are many who use the space to engage in public
1598 discourse. Discussing matters of public import, criticizing others who are
1599 mistaken in their views, criticizing politicians about the decisions they
1600 make, offering solutions to problems we all see: blogs create the sense of a
1601 virtual public meeting, but one in which we don't all hope to be there at
1602 the same time and in which conversations are not necessarily linked. The
1603 best of the blog entries are relatively short; they point directly to words
1604 used by others, criticizing with or adding to them. They are arguably the
1605 most important form of unchoreographed public discourse that we have.
1608 That's a strong statement. Yet it says as much about our democracy as it
1609 does about blogs. This is the part of America that is most difficult for
1610 those of us who love America to accept: Our democracy has atrophied. Of
1611 course we have elections, and most of the time the courts allow those
1612 elections to count. A relatively small number of people vote in those
1613 elections. The cycle of these elections has become totally professionalized
1614 and routinized. Most of us think this is democracy.
1616 But democracy has never just been about elections. Democracy means rule by
1617 the people, but rule means something more than mere elections. In our
1618 tradition, it also means control through reasoned discourse. This was the
1619 idea that captured the imagination of Alexis de Tocqueville, the
1620 nineteenth-century French lawyer who wrote the most important account of
1621 early "Democracy in America." It wasn't popular elections that fascinated
1622 him
—it was the jury, an institution that gave ordinary people the
1623 right to choose life or death for other citizens. And most fascinating for
1624 him was that the jury didn't just vote about the outcome they would
1625 impose. They deliberated. Members argued about the "right" result; they
1626 tried to persuade each other of the "right" result, and in criminal cases at
1627 least, they had to agree upon a unanimous result for the process to come to
1628 an end.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2585472" href=
"#ftn.id2585472" class=
"footnote">40</a>]
</sup>
1630 Yet even this institution flags in American life today. And in its place,
1631 there is no systematic effort to enable citizen deliberation. Some are
1632 pushing to create just such an institution.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2585559" href=
"#ftn.id2585559" class=
"footnote">41</a>]
</sup> And in some towns in New England, something close to deliberation
1633 remains. But for most of us for most of the time, there is no time or place
1634 for "democratic deliberation" to occur.
1636 More bizarrely, there is generally not even permission for it to occur. We,
1637 the most powerful democracy in the world, have developed a strong norm
1638 against talking about politics. It's fine to talk about politics with people
1639 you agree with. But it is rude to argue about politics with people you
1640 disagree with. Political discourse becomes isolated, and isolated discourse
1641 becomes more extreme.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2585583" href=
"#ftn.id2585583" class=
"footnote">42</a>]
</sup> We say what our
1642 friends want to hear, and hear very little beyond what our friends say.
1645 Enter the blog. The blog's very architecture solves one part of this
1646 problem. People post when they want to post, and people read when they want
1647 to read. The most difficult time is synchronous time. Technologies that
1648 enable asynchronous communication, such as e-mail, increase the opportunity
1649 for communication. Blogs allow for public discourse without the public ever
1650 needing to gather in a single public place.
1652 But beyond architecture, blogs also have solved the problem of
1653 norms. There's no norm (yet) in blog space not to talk about politics.
1654 Indeed, the space is filled with political speech, on both the right and the
1655 left. Some of the most popular sites are conservative or libertarian, but
1656 there are many of all political stripes. And even blogs that are not
1657 political cover political issues when the occasion merits.
1659 The significance of these blogs is tiny now, though not so tiny. The name
1660 Howard Dean may well have faded from the
2004 presidential race but for
1661 blogs. Yet even if the number of readers is small, the reading is having an
1662 effect.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2585626"></a>
1664 One direct effect is on stories that had a different life cycle in the
1665 mainstream media. The Trent Lott affair is an example. When Lott "misspoke"
1666 at a party for Senator Strom Thurmond, essentially praising Thurmond's
1667 segregationist policies, he calculated correctly that this story would
1668 disappear from the mainstream press within forty-eight hours. It did. But he
1669 didn't calculate its life cycle in blog space. The bloggers kept researching
1670 the story. Over time, more and more instances of the same "misspeaking"
1671 emerged. Finally, the story broke back into the mainstream press. In the
1672 end, Lott was forced to resign as senate majority leader.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2585646" href=
"#ftn.id2585646" class=
"footnote">43</a>]
</sup> <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2585654"></a>
1674 This different cycle is possible because the same commercial pressures don't
1675 exist with blogs as with other ventures. Television and newspapers are
1676 commercial entities. They must work to keep attention. If they lose
1677 readers, they lose revenue. Like sharks, they must move on.
1679 But bloggers don't have a similar constraint. They can obsess, they can
1680 focus, they can get serious. If a particular blogger writes a particularly
1681 interesting story, more and more people link to that story. And as the
1682 number of links to a particular story increases, it rises in the ranks of
1683 stories. People read what is popular; what is popular has been selected by a
1684 very democratic process of peer-generated rankings.
1685 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"idxwinerdave"></a><p>
1687 There's a second way, as well, in which blogs have a different cycle from
1688 the mainstream press. As Dave Winer, one of the fathers of this movement and
1689 a software author for many decades, told me, another difference is the
1690 absence of a financial "conflict of interest." "I think you have to take the
1691 conflict of interest" out of journalism, Winer told me. "An amateur
1692 journalist simply doesn't have a conflict of interest, or the conflict of
1693 interest is so easily disclosed that you know you can sort of get it out of
1695 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2585706"></a><p>
1696 These conflicts become more important as media becomes more concentrated
1697 (more on this below). A concentrated media can hide more from the public
1698 than an unconcentrated media can
—as CNN admitted it did after the Iraq
1699 war because it was afraid of the consequences to its own
1700 employees.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2585533" href=
"#ftn.id2585533" class=
"footnote">44</a>]
</sup> It also needs to sustain a
1701 more coherent account. (In the middle of the Iraq war, I read a post on the
1702 Internet from someone who was at that time listening to a satellite uplink
1703 with a reporter in Iraq. The New York headquarters was telling the reporter
1704 over and over that her account of the war was too bleak: She needed to offer
1705 a more optimistic story. When she told New York that wasn't warranted, they
1706 told her
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>that
</em></span> they were writing "the story.")
1707 </p><p> Blog space gives amateurs a way to enter the debate
—"amateur" not in
1708 the sense of inexperienced, but in the sense of an Olympic athlete, meaning
1709 not paid by anyone to give their reports. It allows for a much broader range
1710 of input into a story, as reporting on the Columbia disaster revealed, when
1711 hundreds from across the southwest United States turned to the Internet to
1712 retell what they had seen.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2585741" href=
"#ftn.id2585741" class=
"footnote">45</a>]
</sup> And it
1713 drives readers to read across the range of accounts and "triangulate," as
1714 Winer puts it, the truth. Blogs, Winer says, are "communicating directly
1715 with our constituency, and the middle man is out of it"
—with all the
1716 benefits, and costs, that might entail.
1719 Winer is optimistic about the future of journalism infected with
1720 blogs. "It's going to become an essential skill," Winer predicts, for public
1721 figures and increasingly for private figures as well. It's not clear that
1722 "journalism" is happy about this
—some journalists have been told to
1723 curtail their blogging.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2585772" href=
"#ftn.id2585772" class=
"footnote">46</a>]
</sup> But it is clear
1724 that we are still in transition. "A lot of what we are doing now is warm-up
1725 exercises," Winer told me. There is a lot that must mature before this
1726 space has its mature effect. And as the inclusion of content in this space
1727 is the least infringing use of the Internet (meaning infringing on
1728 copyright), Winer said, "we will be the last thing that gets shut down."
1730 This speech affects democracy. Winer thinks that happens because "you don't
1731 have to work for somebody who controls, [for] a gatekeeper." That is
1732 true. But it affects democracy in another way as well. As more and more
1733 citizens express what they think, and defend it in writing, that will change
1734 the way people understand public issues. It is easy to be wrong and
1735 misguided in your head. It is harder when the product of your mind can be
1736 criticized by others. Of course, it is a rare human who admits that he has
1737 been persuaded that he is wrong. But it is even rarer for a human to ignore
1738 when he has been proven wrong. The writing of ideas, arguments, and
1739 criticism improves democracy. Today there are probably a couple of million
1740 blogs where such writing happens. When there are ten million, there will be
1741 something extraordinary to report.
1742 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2585838"></a><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"idxbrownjohnseely"></a><p>
1743 John Seely Brown is the chief scientist of the Xerox Corporation. His work,
1744 as his Web site describes it, is "human learning and . . . the creation of
1745 knowledge ecologies for creating . . . innovation."
1747 Brown thus looks at these technologies of digital creativity a bit
1748 differently from the perspectives I've sketched so far. I'm sure he would be
1749 excited about any technology that might improve democracy. But his real
1750 excitement comes from how these technologies affect learning.
1753 As Brown believes, we learn by tinkering. When "a lot of us grew up," he
1754 explains, that tinkering was done "on motorcycle engines, lawnmower engines,
1755 automobiles, radios, and so on." But digital technologies enable a different
1756 kind of tinkering
—with abstract ideas though in concrete form. The
1757 kids at Just Think! not only think about how a commercial portrays a
1758 politician; using digital technology, they can take the commercial apart and
1759 manipulate it, tinker with it to see how it does what it does. Digital
1760 technologies launch a kind of bricolage, or "free collage," as Brown calls
1761 it. Many get to add to or transform the tinkering of many others.
1763 The best large-scale example of this kind of tinkering so far is free
1764 software or open-source software (FS/OSS). FS/OSS is software whose source
1765 code is shared. Anyone can download the technology that makes a FS/OSS
1766 program run. And anyone eager to learn how a particular bit of FS/OSS
1767 technology works can tinker with the code.
1769 This opportunity creates a "completely new kind of learning platform," as
1770 Brown describes. "As soon as you start doing that, you . . . unleash a free
1771 collage on the community, so that other people can start looking at your
1772 code, tinkering with it, trying it out, seeing if they can improve it." Each
1773 effort is a kind of apprenticeship. "Open source becomes a major
1774 apprenticeship platform."
1776 In this process, "the concrete things you tinker with are abstract. They
1777 are code." Kids are "shifting to the ability to tinker in the abstract, and
1778 this tinkering is no longer an isolated activity that you're doing in your
1779 garage. You are tinkering with a community platform. . . . You are
1780 tinkering with other people's stuff. The more you tinker the more you
1781 improve." The more you improve, the more you learn.
1783 This same thing happens with content, too. And it happens in the same
1784 collaborative way when that content is part of the Web. As Brown puts it,
1785 "the Web [is] the first medium that truly honors multiple forms of
1786 intelligence." Earlier technologies, such as the typewriter or word
1787 processors, helped amplify text. But the Web amplifies much more than
1788 text. "The Web . . . says if you are musical, if you are artistic, if you
1789 are visual, if you are interested in film . . . [then] there is a lot you
1790 can start to do on this medium. [It] can now amplify and honor these
1791 multiple forms of intelligence."
1792 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2585932"></a><p>
1794 Brown is talking about what Elizabeth Daley, Stephanie Barish, and Just
1795 Think! teach: that this tinkering with culture teaches as well as
1796 creates. It develops talents differently, and it builds a different kind of
1799 Yet the freedom to tinker with these objects is not guaranteed. Indeed, as
1800 we'll see through the course of this book, that freedom is increasingly
1801 highly contested. While there's no doubt that your father had the right to
1802 tinker with the car engine, there's great doubt that your child will have
1803 the right to tinker with the images she finds all around. The law and,
1804 increasingly, technology interfere with a freedom that technology, and
1805 curiosity, would otherwise ensure.
1807 These restrictions have become the focus of researchers and scholars.
1808 Professor Ed Felten of Princeton (whom we'll see more of in chapter
10) has
1809 developed a powerful argument in favor of the "right to tinker" as it
1810 applies to computer science and to knowledge in general.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2585965" href=
"#ftn.id2585965" class=
"footnote">47</a>]
</sup> But Brown's concern is earlier, or younger, or more
1811 fundamental. It is about the learning that kids can do, or can't do, because
1814 "This is where education in the twenty-first century is going," Brown
1815 explains. We need to "understand how kids who grow up digital think and want
1818 "Yet," as Brown continued, and as the balance of this book will evince, "we
1819 are building a legal system that completely suppresses the natural
1820 tendencies of today's digital kids. . . . We're building an architecture
1821 that unleashes
60 percent of the brain [and] a legal system that closes down
1822 that part of the brain."
1823 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2585996"></a><p>
1824 We're building a technology that takes the magic of Kodak, mixes moving
1825 images and sound, and adds a space for commentary and an opportunity to
1826 spread that creativity everywhere. But we're building the law to close down
1829 "No way to run a culture," as Brewster Kahle, whom we'll meet in chapter
9,
1830 quipped to me in a rare moment of despondence.
1831 </p><div class=
"footnotes"><br><hr width=
"100" align=
"left"><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2584712" href=
"#id2584712" class=
"para">26</a>]
</sup>
1834 Reese V. Jenkins,
<em class=
"citetitle">Images and Enterprise
</em> (Baltimore:
1835 Johns Hopkins University Press,
1975),
112.
1836 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2584740" href=
"#id2584740" class=
"para">27</a>]
</sup>
1838 Brian Coe,
<em class=
"citetitle">The Birth of Photography
</em> (New York:
1839 Taplinger Publishing,
1977),
53.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2584749"></a>
1840 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2584773" href=
"#id2584773" class=
"para">28</a>]
</sup>
1844 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2584781" href=
"#id2584781" class=
"para">29</a>]
</sup>
1847 Basert på et diagram i Jenkins, s.
178.
1848 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2584820" href=
"#id2584820" class=
"para">30</a>]
</sup>
1852 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2584855" href=
"#id2584855" class=
"para">31</a>]
</sup>
1855 For illustrative cases, see, for example,
<em class=
"citetitle">Pavesich
</em>
1856 v.
<em class=
"citetitle">N.E. Life Ins. Co
</em>.,
50 S.E.
68 (Ga.
1905);
1857 <em class=
"citetitle">Foster-Milburn Co
</em>. v.
<em class=
"citetitle">Chinn
</em>,
1858 123090 S.W.
364,
366 (Ky.
1909);
<em class=
"citetitle">Corliss
</em>
1859 v.
<em class=
"citetitle">Walker
</em>,
64 F.
280 (Mass. Dist. Ct.
1894).
1860 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2584911" href=
"#id2584911" class=
"para">32</a>]
</sup>
1862 Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis, "The Right to Privacy,"
1863 <em class=
"citetitle">Harvard Law Review
</em> 4 (
1890):
193.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2584920"></a> <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2584928"></a>
1864 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2584956" href=
"#id2584956" class=
"para">33</a>]
</sup>
1867 See Melville B. Nimmer, "The Right of Publicity,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Law and
1868 Contemporary Problems
</em> 19 (
1954):
203; William L. Prosser,
1869 "Privacy," <em class=
"citetitle">California Law Review
</em> 48 (
1960)
1870 398–407;
<em class=
"citetitle">White
</em> v.
<em class=
"citetitle">Samsung
1871 Electronics America, Inc
</em>.,
971 F.
2d
1395 (
9th Cir.
1992),
1872 cert. denied,
508 U.S.
951 (
1993).
1873 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2585046" href=
"#id2585046" class=
"para">34</a>]
</sup>
1876 H. Edward Goldberg, "Essential Presentation Tools: Hardware and Software You
1877 Need to Create Digital Multimedia Presentations," cadalyst, februar
2002,
1878 tilgjengelig fra
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
7</a>.
1879 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2585096" href=
"#id2585096" class=
"para">35</a>]
</sup>
1882 Judith Van Evra,
<em class=
"citetitle">Television and Child Development
</em>
1883 (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates,
1990); "Findings on Family
1884 and TV Study,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Denver Post
</em>,
25 May
1997, B6.
1885 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2585154" href=
"#id2585154" class=
"para">36</a>]
</sup>
1887 Intervju med Elizabeth Daley og Stephanie Barish,
13. desember
2002.
1888 <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2585161"></a> <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2585170"></a>
1889 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2585186" href=
"#id2585186" class=
"para">37</a>]
</sup>
1892 Se Scott Steinberg, "Crichton Gets Medieval on PCs," E!online,
4. november
1893 2000, tilgjengelig fra
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link
1894 #
8</a>; "Timeline,"
22. november
2000, tilgjengelig fra
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
9</a>.
1895 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2585265" href=
"#id2585265" class=
"para">38</a>]
</sup>
1897 Intervju med Daley og Barish.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2585272"></a>
1898 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2585283" href=
"#id2585283" class=
"para">39</a>]
</sup>
1902 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2585472" href=
"#id2585472" class=
"para">40</a>]
</sup>
1905 Se for eksempel Alexis de Tocqueville,
<em class=
"citetitle">Democracy in
1906 America
</em>, bk.
1, overs. Henry Reeve (New York: Bantam Books,
1908 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2585559" href=
"#id2585559" class=
"para">41</a>]
</sup>
1911 Bruce Ackerman and James Fishkin, "Deliberation Day,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Journal of
1912 Political Philosophy
</em> 10 (
2) (
2002):
129.
1913 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2585583" href=
"#id2585583" class=
"para">42</a>]
</sup>
1916 Cass Sunstein,
<em class=
"citetitle">Republic.com
</em> (Princeton: Princeton
1917 University Press,
2001),
65–80,
175,
182,
183,
192.
1918 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2585646" href=
"#id2585646" class=
"para">43</a>]
</sup>
1921 Noah Shachtman, "With Incessant Postings, a Pundit Stirs the Pot," New York
1922 Times,
16 January
2003, G5.
1923 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2585533" href=
"#id2585533" class=
"para">44</a>]
</sup>
1926 Telefonintervju med David Winer,
16. april
2003.
1927 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2585741" href=
"#id2585741" class=
"para">45</a>]
</sup>
1930 John Schwartz, "Loss of the Shuttle: The Internet; A Wealth of Information
1931 Online,"
<em class=
"citetitle">New York Times
</em>,
2 February
2003, A28; Staci
1932 D. Kramer, "Shuttle Disaster Coverage Mixed, but Strong Overall," Online
1933 Journalism Review,
2 February
2003, available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
10</a>.
1934 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2585772" href=
"#id2585772" class=
"para">46</a>]
</sup>
1936 See Michael Falcone, "Does an Editor's Pencil Ruin a Web Log?"
1937 <em class=
"citetitle">New York Times
</em>,
29 September
2003, C4. ("Not all news
1938 organizations have been as accepting of employees who blog. Kevin Sites, a
1939 CNN correspondent in Iraq who started a blog about his reporting of the war
1940 on March
9, stopped posting
12 days later at his bosses' request. Last year
1941 Steve Olafson, a
<em class=
"citetitle">Houston Chronicle
</em> reporter, was
1942 fired for keeping a personal Web log, published under a pseudonym, that
1943 dealt with some of the issues and people he was covering.")
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2585803"></a>
1944 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2585965" href=
"#id2585965" class=
"para">47</a>]
</sup>
1947 See, for example, Edward Felten and Andrew Appel, "Technological Access
1948 Control Interferes with Noninfringing Scholarship,"
1949 <em class=
"citetitle">Communications of the Association for Computer
1950 Machinery
</em> 43 (
2000):
9.
1951 </p></div></div></div><div class=
"chapter" title=
"Kapittel 4. Kapittel tre: Kataloger"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h2 class=
"title"><a name=
"catalogs"></a>Kapittel
4. Kapittel tre: Kataloger
</h2></div></div></div><p>
1952 Høsten
2001, ble Jesse Jordan fra Oceanside, New York, innrullert som
1953 førsteårsstudent ved Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, i Troy, New York.
1954 Hans studieprogram ved RPI var informasjonsteknologi. Selv om han ikke var
1955 en programmerer, bestemte Jesse seg i oktober å begynne å fikle med en
1956 søkemotorteknologi som var tilgjengelig på RPI-nettverket.
1958 RPI is one of America's foremost technological research institutions. It
1959 offers degrees in fields ranging from architecture and engineering to
1960 information sciences. More than
65 percent of its five thousand
1961 undergraduates finished in the top
10 percent of their high school
1962 class. The school is thus a perfect mix of talent and experience to imagine
1963 and then build, a generation for the network age.
1965 RPI's computer network links students, faculty, and administration to one
1966 another. It also links RPI to the Internet. Not everything available on the
1967 RPI network is available on the Internet. But the network is designed to
1968 enable students to get access to the Internet, as well as more intimate
1969 access to other members of the RPI community.
1972 Search engines are a measure of a network's intimacy. Google brought the
1973 Internet much closer to all of us by fantastically improving the quality of
1974 search on the network. Specialty search engines can do this even better. The
1975 idea of "intranet" search engines, search engines that search within the
1976 network of a particular institution, is to provide users of that institution
1977 with better access to material from that institution. Businesses do this
1978 all the time, enabling employees to have access to material that people
1979 outside the business can't get. Universities do it as well.
1981 These engines are enabled by the network technology itself. Microsoft, for
1982 example, has a network file system that makes it very easy for search
1983 engines tuned to that network to query the system for information about the
1984 publicly (within that network) available content. Jesse's search engine was
1985 built to take advantage of this technology. It used Microsoft's network file
1986 system to build an index of all the files available within the RPI network.
1988 Jesse's wasn't the first search engine built for the RPI network. Indeed,
1989 his engine was a simple modification of engines that others had built. His
1990 single most important improvement over those engines was to fix a bug within
1991 the Microsoft file-sharing system that could cause a user's computer to
1992 crash. With the engines that existed before, if you tried to access a file
1993 through a Windows browser that was on a computer that was off-line, your
1994 computer could crash. Jesse modified the system a bit to fix that problem,
1995 by adding a button that a user could click to see if the machine holding the
1996 file was still on-line.
1998 Jesse's engine went on-line in late October. Over the following six months,
1999 he continued to tweak it to improve its functionality. By March, the system
2000 was functioning quite well. Jesse had more than one million files in his
2001 directory, including every type of content that might be on users'
2005 Thus the index his search engine produced included pictures, which students
2006 could use to put on their own Web sites; copies of notes or research; copies
2007 of information pamphlets; movie clips that students might have created;
2008 university brochures
—basically anything that users of the RPI network
2009 made available in a public folder of their computer.
2011 But the index also included music files. In fact, one quarter of the files
2012 that Jesse's search engine listed were music files. But that means, of
2013 course, that three quarters were not, and
—so that this point is
2014 absolutely clear
—Jesse did nothing to induce people to put music files
2015 in their public folders. He did nothing to target the search engine to these
2016 files. He was a kid tinkering with a Google-like technology at a university
2017 where he was studying information science, and hence, tinkering was the
2018 aim. Unlike Google, or Microsoft, for that matter, he made no money from
2019 this tinkering; he was not connected to any business that would make any
2020 money from this experiment. He was a kid tinkering with technology in an
2021 environment where tinkering with technology was precisely what he was
2024 On April
3,
2003, Jesse was contacted by the dean of students at RPI. The
2025 dean informed Jesse that the Recording Industry Association of America, the
2026 RIAA, would be filing a lawsuit against him and three other students whom he
2027 didn't even know, two of them at other universities. A few hours later,
2028 Jesse was served with papers from the suit. As he read these papers and
2029 watched the news reports about them, he was increasingly astonished.
2031 "It was absurd," he told me. "I don't think I did anything wrong. . . . I
2032 don't think there's anything wrong with the search engine that I ran or
2033 . . . what I had done to it. I mean, I hadn't modified it in any way that
2034 promoted or enhanced the work of pirates. I just modified the search engine
2035 in a way that would make it easier to use"
—again, a
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>search
2036 engine
</em></span>, which Jesse had not himself built, using the Windows
2037 filesharing system, which Jesse had not himself built, to enable members of
2038 the RPI community to get access to content, which Jesse had not himself
2039 created or posted, and the vast majority of which had nothing to do with
2043 But the RIAA branded Jesse a pirate. They claimed he operated a network and
2044 had therefore "willfully" violated copyright laws. They demanded that he pay
2045 them the damages for his wrong. For cases of "willful infringement," the
2046 Copyright Act specifies something lawyers call "statutory damages." These
2047 damages permit a copyright owner to claim $
150,
000 per infringement. As the
2048 RIAA alleged more than one hundred specific copyright infringements, they
2049 therefore demanded that Jesse pay them at least $
15,
000,
000.
2051 Similar lawsuits were brought against three other students: one other
2052 student at RPI, one at Michigan Technical University, and one at
2053 Princeton. Their situations were similar to Jesse's. Though each case was
2054 different in detail, the bottom line in each was exactly the same: huge
2055 demands for "damages" that the RIAA claimed it was entitled to. If you
2056 added up the claims, these four lawsuits were asking courts in the United
2057 States to award the plaintiffs close to $
100
2058 <span class=
"emphasis"><em>billion
</em></span>—six times the
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>total
</em></span>
2059 profit of the film industry in
2001.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2586206" href=
"#ftn.id2586206" class=
"footnote">48</a>]
</sup>
2061 Jesse called his parents. They were supportive but a bit frightened. An
2062 uncle was a lawyer. He began negotiations with the RIAA. They demanded to
2063 know how much money Jesse had. Jesse had saved $
12,
000 from summer jobs and
2064 other employment. They demanded $
12,
000 to dismiss the case.
2066 The RIAA wanted Jesse to admit to doing something wrong. He refused. They
2067 wanted him to agree to an injunction that would essentially make it
2068 impossible for him to work in many fields of technology for the rest of his
2069 life. He refused. They made him understand that this process of being sued
2070 was not going to be pleasant. (As Jesse's father recounted to me, the chief
2071 lawyer on the case, Matt Oppenheimer, told Jesse, "You don't want to pay
2072 another visit to a dentist like me.") And throughout, the RIAA insisted it
2073 would not settle the case until it took every penny Jesse had saved.
2076 Jesse's family was outraged at these claims. They wanted to fight. But
2077 Jesse's uncle worked to educate the family about the nature of the American
2078 legal system. Jesse could fight the RIAA. He might even win. But the cost of
2079 fighting a lawsuit like this, Jesse was told, would be at least $
250,
000. If
2080 he won, he would not recover that money. If he won, he would have a piece of
2081 paper saying he had won, and a piece of paper saying he and his family were
2084 Så Jesse hadde et mafia-lignende valg: $
250,
000 og en sjanse til å vinne,
2085 eller $
12.000 og et forlik.
2087 The recording industry insists this is a matter of law and morality. Let's
2088 put the law aside for a moment and think about the morality. Where is the
2089 morality in a lawsuit like this? What is the virtue in scapegoatism? The
2090 RIAA is an extraordinarily powerful lobby. The president of the RIAA is
2091 reported to make more than $
1 million a year. Artists, on the other hand,
2092 are not well paid. The average recording artist makes $
45,
900.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2586271" href=
"#ftn.id2586271" class=
"footnote">49</a>]
</sup> There are plenty of ways for the RIAA to affect and
2093 direct policy. So where is the morality in taking money from a student for
2094 running a search engine?
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2586287" href=
"#ftn.id2586287" class=
"footnote">50</a>]
</sup>
2096 23. juni overførte Jesse alle sine oppsparte midler til advokaten som jobbet
2097 for RIA. Saken mot ham ble trukket. Og med dette, ble unggutten som hadde
2098 fiklet med en datamaskin og blitt saksøkt for
15 millioner dollar en
2100 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
2101 I was definitely not an activist [before]. I never really meant to be an
2102 activist. . . . [But] I've been pushed into this. In no way did I ever
2103 foresee anything like this, but I think it's just completely absurd what the
2105 </p></blockquote></div><p>
2106 Jesse's parents betray a certain pride in their reluctant activist. As his
2107 father told me, Jesse "considers himself very conservative, and so do
2108 I. . . . He's not a tree hugger. . . . I think it's bizarre that they would
2109 pick on him. But he wants to let people know that they're sending the wrong
2110 message. And he wants to correct the record."
2111 </p><div class=
"footnotes"><br><hr width=
"100" align=
"left"><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2586206" href=
"#id2586206" class=
"para">48</a>]
</sup>
2115 Tim Goral, "Recording Industry Goes After Campus P-
2-P Networks: Suit
2116 Alleges $
97.8 Billion in Damages,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Professional Media Group
2117 LCC
</em> 6 (
2003):
5, tilgjengelig fra
2003 WL
55179443.
2118 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2586271" href=
"#id2586271" class=
"para">49</a>]
</sup>
2121 Occupational Employment Survey, U.S. Dept. of Labor (
2001)
2122 (
27–2042—Musicians and Singers). See also National Endowment for
2123 the Arts,
<em class=
"citetitle">More Than One in a Blue Moon
</em> (
2000).
2124 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2586287" href=
"#id2586287" class=
"para">50</a>]
</sup>
2127 Douglas Lichtman kommer med et relatert poeng i "KaZaA and Punishment,"
2128 <em class=
"citetitle">Wall Street Journal
</em>,
10. september
2003, A24.
2129 </p></div></div></div><div class=
"chapter" title='Kapittel
5. Kapittel fire:
"Pirater"'
><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h2 class=
"title"><a name=
"pirates"></a>Kapittel
5. Kapittel fire: "Pirater"
</h2></div></div></div><div class=
"toc"><p><b>Innholdsfortegnelse
</b></p><dl><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#film">Film
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#recordedmusic">Innspilt musikk
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#radio">Radio
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#cabletv">Kabel-TV
</a></span></dt></dl></div><p>
2130 If "piracy" means using the creative property of others without their
2131 permission
—if "if value, then right" is true
—then the history of
2132 the content industry is a history of piracy. Every important sector of "big
2133 media" today
—film, records, radio, and cable TV
—was born of a
2134 kind of piracy so defined. The consistent story is how last generation's
2135 pirates join this generation's country club
—until now.
2136 </p><div class=
"section" title=
"Film"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h2 class=
"title" style=
"clear: both"><a name=
"film"></a>Film
</h2></div></div></div><p>
2138 The film industry of Hollywood was built by fleeing pirates.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2586364" href=
"#ftn.id2586364" class=
"footnote">51</a>]
</sup> Creators and directors migrated from the East Coast
2139 to California in the early twentieth century in part to escape controls that
2140 patents granted the inventor of filmmaking, Thomas Edison. These controls
2141 were exercised through a monopoly "trust," the Motion Pictures Patents
2142 Company, and were based on Thomas Edison's creative property
—patents.
2143 Edison formed the MPPC to exercise the rights this creative property gave
2144 him, and the MPPC was serious about the control it demanded.
2146 As one commentator tells one part of the story,
2147 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
2148 A January
1909 deadline was set for all companies to comply with the
2149 license. By February, unlicensed outlaws, who referred to themselves as
2150 independents protested the trust and carried on business without submitting
2151 to the Edison monopoly. In the summer of
1909 the independent movement was
2152 in full-swing, with producers and theater owners using illegal equipment and
2153 imported film stock to create their own underground market.
2155 With the country experiencing a tremendous expansion in the number of
2156 nickelodeons, the Patents Company reacted to the independent movement by
2157 forming a strong-arm subsidiary known as the General Film Company to block
2158 the entry of non-licensed independents. With coercive tactics that have
2159 become legendary, General Film confiscated unlicensed equipment,
2160 discontinued product supply to theaters which showed unlicensed films, and
2161 effectively monopolized distribution with the acquisition of all U.S. film
2162 exchanges, except for the one owned by the independent William Fox who
2163 defied the Trust even after his license was revoked.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2586422" href=
"#ftn.id2586422" class=
"footnote">52</a>]
</sup> <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2586448"></a> <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2586454"></a>
2164 </p></blockquote></div><p>
2165 The Napsters of those days, the "independents," were companies like Fox. And
2166 no less than today, these independents were vigorously resisted. "Shooting
2167 was disrupted by machinery stolen, and `accidents' resulting in loss of
2168 negatives, equipment, buildings and sometimes life and limb frequently
2169 occurred."
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2586470" href=
"#ftn.id2586470" class=
"footnote">53</a>]
</sup> That led the independents to
2170 flee the East Coast. California was remote enough from Edison's reach that
2171 filmmakers there could pirate his inventions without fear of the law. And
2172 the leaders of Hollywood filmmaking, Fox most prominently, did just that.
2175 Of course, California grew quickly, and the effective enforcement of federal
2176 law eventually spread west. But because patents grant the patent holder a
2177 truly "limited" monopoly (just seventeen years at that time), by the time
2178 enough federal marshals appeared, the patents had expired. A new industry
2179 had been born, in part from the piracy of Edison's creative property.
2180 </p></div><div class=
"section" title=
"Innspilt musikk"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h2 class=
"title" style=
"clear: both"><a name=
"recordedmusic"></a>Innspilt musikk
</h2></div></div></div><p>
2181 Plateindustrien ble født av en annen type piratvirksomhet, dog for å forstå
2182 hvordan krever at en setter seg inn i detaljer om hvordan loven regulerer
2185 At the time that Edison and Henri Fourneaux invented machines for
2186 reproducing music (Edison the phonograph, Fourneaux the player piano), the
2187 law gave composers the exclusive right to control copies of their music and
2188 the exclusive right to control public performances of their music. In other
2189 words, in
1900, if I wanted a copy of Phil Russel's
1899 hit "Happy Mose,"
2190 the law said I would have to pay for the right to get a copy of the musical
2191 score, and I would also have to pay for the right to perform it publicly.
2192 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2586533"></a><p>
2193 But what if I wanted to record "Happy Mose," using Edison's phonograph or
2194 Fourneaux's player piano? Here the law stumbled. It was clear enough that I
2195 would have to buy any copy of the musical score that I performed in making
2196 this recording. And it was clear enough that I would have to pay for any
2197 public performance of the work I was recording. But it wasn't totally clear
2198 that I would have to pay for a "public performance" if I recorded the song
2199 in my own house (even today, you don't owe the Beatles anything if you sing
2200 their songs in the shower), or if I recorded the song from memory (copies in
2201 your brain are not
—yet
— regulated by copyright law). So if I
2202 simply sang the song into a recording device in the privacy of my own home,
2203 it wasn't clear that I owed the composer anything. And more importantly, it
2204 wasn't clear whether I owed the composer anything if I then made copies of
2205 those recordings. Because of this gap in the law, then, I could effectively
2206 pirate someone else's song without paying its composer anything.
2209 The composers (and publishers) were none too happy about this capacity to
2210 pirate. As South Dakota senator Alfred Kittredge put it,
2211 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
2212 Imagine the injustice of the thing. A composer writes a song or an opera. A
2213 publisher buys at great expense the rights to the same and copyrights
2214 it. Along come the phonographic companies and companies who cut music rolls
2215 and deliberately steal the work of the brain of the composer and publisher
2216 without any regard for [their] rights.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2586580" href=
"#ftn.id2586580" class=
"footnote">54</a>]
</sup>
2217 </p></blockquote></div><p>
2218 The innovators who developed the technology to record other people's works
2219 were "sponging upon the toil, the work, the talent, and genius of American
2220 composers,"
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2586602" href=
"#ftn.id2586602" class=
"footnote">55</a>]
</sup> and the "music publishing
2221 industry" was thereby "at the complete mercy of this one
2222 pirate."
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2586613" href=
"#ftn.id2586613" class=
"footnote">56</a>]
</sup> As John Philip Sousa put it,
2223 in as direct a way as possible, "When they make money out of my pieces, I
2224 want a share of it."
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2586624" href=
"#ftn.id2586624" class=
"footnote">57</a>]
</sup>
2226 These arguments have familiar echoes in the wars of our day. So, too, do the
2227 arguments on the other side. The innovators who developed the player piano
2228 argued that "it is perfectly demonstrable that the introduction of automatic
2229 music players has not deprived any composer of anything he had before their
2230 introduction." Rather, the machines increased the sales of sheet
2231 music.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2586642" href=
"#ftn.id2586642" class=
"footnote">58</a>]
</sup> In any case, the innovators
2232 argued, the job of Congress was "to consider first the interest of [the
2233 public], whom they represent, and whose servants they are." "All talk about
2234 `theft,'" the general counsel of the American Graphophone Company wrote, "is
2235 the merest claptrap, for there exists no property in ideas musical, literary
2236 or artistic, except as defined by statute."
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2586647" href=
"#ftn.id2586647" class=
"footnote">59</a>]
</sup>
2239 The law soon resolved this battle in favor of the composer
2240 <span class=
"emphasis"><em>and
</em></span> the recording artist. Congress amended the law to
2241 make sure that composers would be paid for the "mechanical reproductions" of
2242 their music. But rather than simply granting the composer complete control
2243 over the right to make mechanical reproductions, Congress gave recording
2244 artists a right to record the music, at a price set by Congress, once the
2245 composer allowed it to be recorded once. This is the part of copyright law
2246 that makes cover songs possible. Once a composer authorizes a recording of
2247 his song, others are free to record the same song, so long as they pay the
2248 original composer a fee set by the law.
2250 American law ordinarily calls this a "compulsory license," but I will refer
2251 to it as a "statutory license." A statutory license is a license whose key
2252 terms are set by law. After Congress's amendment of the Copyright Act in
2253 1909, record companies were free to distribute copies of recordings so long
2254 as they paid the composer (or copyright holder) the fee set by the statute.
2256 This is an exception within the law of copyright. When John Grisham writes a
2257 novel, a publisher is free to publish that novel only if Grisham gives the
2258 publisher permission. Grisham, in turn, is free to charge whatever he wants
2259 for that permission. The price to publish Grisham is thus set by Grisham,
2260 and copyright law ordinarily says you have no permission to use Grisham's
2261 work except with permission of Grisham.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2586714"></a>
2263 But the law governing recordings gives recording artists less. And thus, in
2264 effect, the law
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>subsidizes
</em></span> the recording industry
2265 through a kind of piracy
—by giving recording artists a weaker right
2266 than it otherwise gives creative authors. The Beatles have less control over
2267 their creative work than Grisham does. And the beneficiaries of this less
2268 control are the recording industry and the public. The recording industry
2269 gets something of value for less than it otherwise would pay; the public
2270 gets access to a much wider range of musical creativity. Indeed, Congress
2271 was quite explicit about its reasons for granting this right. Its fear was
2272 the monopoly power of rights holders, and that that power would stifle
2273 follow-on creativity.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2586388" href=
"#ftn.id2586388" class=
"footnote">60</a>]
</sup> <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2586755"></a>
2275 While the recording industry has been quite coy about this recently,
2276 historically it has been quite a supporter of the statutory license for
2277 records. As a
1967 report from the House Committee on the Judiciary relates,
2278 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
2279 the record producers argued vigorously that the compulsory license system
2280 must be retained. They asserted that the record industry is a
2281 half-billion-dollar business of great economic importance in the United
2282 States and throughout the world; records today are the principal means of
2283 disseminating music, and this creates special problems, since performers
2284 need unhampered access to musical material on nondiscriminatory
2285 terms. Historically, the record producers pointed out, there were no
2286 recording rights before
1909 and the
1909 statute adopted the compulsory
2287 license as a deliberate anti-monopoly condition on the grant of these
2288 rights. They argue that the result has been an outpouring of recorded music,
2289 with the public being given lower prices, improved quality, and a greater
2290 choice.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2586787" href=
"#ftn.id2586787" class=
"footnote">61</a>]
</sup>
2291 </p></blockquote></div><p>
2292 By limiting the rights musicians have, by partially pirating their creative
2293 work, the record producers, and the public, benefit.
2294 </p></div><div class=
"section" title=
"Radio"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h2 class=
"title" style=
"clear: both"><a name=
"radio"></a>Radio
</h2></div></div></div><p>
2295 Radio was also born of piracy.
2297 When a radio station plays a record on the air, that constitutes a "public
2298 performance" of the composer's work.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2586823" href=
"#ftn.id2586823" class=
"footnote">62</a>]
</sup> As
2299 I described above, the law gives the composer (or copyright holder) an
2300 exclusive right to public performances of his work. The radio station thus
2301 owes the composer money for that performance.
2304 But when the radio station plays a record, it is not only performing a copy
2305 of the
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>composer's
</em></span> work. The radio station is also
2306 performing a copy of the
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>recording artist's
</em></span> work. It's
2307 one thing to have "Happy Birthday" sung on the radio by the local children's
2308 choir; it's quite another to have it sung by the Rolling Stones or Lyle
2309 Lovett. The recording artist is adding to the value of the composition
2310 performed on the radio station. And if the law were perfectly consistent,
2311 the radio station would have to pay the recording artist for his work, just
2312 as it pays the composer of the music for his work.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2586889"></a>
2316 But it doesn't. Under the law governing radio performances, the radio
2317 station does not have to pay the recording artist. The radio station need
2318 only pay the composer. The radio station thus gets a bit of something for
2319 nothing. It gets to perform the recording artist's work for free, even if it
2320 must pay the composer something for the privilege of playing the song.
2321 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"idxmadonna"></a><p>
2322 This difference can be huge. Imagine you compose a piece of music. Imagine
2323 it is your first. You own the exclusive right to authorize public
2324 performances of that music. So if Madonna wants to sing your song in public,
2325 she has to get your permission.
2327 Imagine she does sing your song, and imagine she likes it a lot. She then
2328 decides to make a recording of your song, and it becomes a top hit. Under
2329 our law, every time a radio station plays your song, you get some money. But
2330 Madonna gets nothing, save the indirect effect on the sale of her CDs. The
2331 public performance of her recording is not a "protected" right. The radio
2332 station thus gets to
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>pirate
</em></span> the value of Madonna's work
2333 without paying her anything.
2334 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2586940"></a><p>
2335 No doubt, one might argue that, on balance, the recording artists
2336 benefit. On average, the promotion they get is worth more than the
2337 performance rights they give up. Maybe. But even if so, the law ordinarily
2338 gives the creator the right to make this choice. By making the choice for
2339 him or her, the law gives the radio station the right to take something for
2341 </p></div><div class=
"section" title=
"Kabel-TV"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h2 class=
"title" style=
"clear: both"><a name=
"cabletv"></a>Kabel-TV
</h2></div></div></div><p>
2343 Cable TV was also born of a kind of piracy.
2346 When cable entrepreneurs first started wiring communities with cable
2347 television in
1948, most refused to pay broadcasters for the content that
2348 they echoed to their customers. Even when the cable companies started
2349 selling access to television broadcasts, they refused to pay for what they
2350 sold. Cable companies were thus Napsterizing broadcasters' content, but more
2351 egregiously than anything Napster ever did
— Napster never charged for
2352 the content it enabled others to give away.
2353 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2586975"></a><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2586991"></a><p>
2354 Broadcasters and copyright owners were quick to attack this theft. Rosel
2355 Hyde, chairman of the FCC, viewed the practice as a kind of "unfair and
2356 potentially destructive competition."
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2587003" href=
"#ftn.id2587003" class=
"footnote">63</a>]
</sup>
2357 There may have been a "public interest" in spreading the reach of cable TV,
2358 but as Douglas Anello, general counsel to the National Association of
2359 Broadcasters, asked Senator Quentin Burdick during testimony, "Does public
2360 interest dictate that you use somebody else's property?"
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2587018" href=
"#ftn.id2587018" class=
"footnote">64</a>]
</sup> As another broadcaster put it,
2361 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
2362 The extraordinary thing about the CATV business is that it is the only
2363 business I know of where the product that is being sold is not paid
2364 for.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2587036" href=
"#ftn.id2587036" class=
"footnote">65</a>]
</sup>
2365 </p></blockquote></div><p>
2366 Again, the demand of the copyright holders seemed reasonable enough:
2367 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
2368 All we are asking for is a very simple thing, that people who now take our
2369 property for nothing pay for it. We are trying to stop piracy and I don't
2370 think there is any lesser word to describe it. I think there are harsher
2371 words which would fit it.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2587060" href=
"#ftn.id2587060" class=
"footnote">66</a>]
</sup>
2372 </p></blockquote></div><p>
2373 Disse var "gratispassasjerer", sa presidenten Charlton Heston i Screen
2374 Actor's Guild, som "tok lønna fra skuespillerne"
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2587078" href=
"#ftn.id2587078" class=
"footnote">67</a>]
</sup>
2376 Men igjen, det er en annen side i debatten. Som assisterende justisminister
2377 Edwin Zimmerman sa det,
2378 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
2379 Our point here is that unlike the problem of whether you have any copyright
2380 protection at all, the problem here is whether copyright holders who are
2381 already compensated, who already have a monopoly, should be permitted to
2382 extend that monopoly. . . . The question here is how much compensation they
2383 should have and how far back they should carry their right to
2384 compensation.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2587104" href=
"#ftn.id2587104" class=
"footnote">68</a>]
</sup> <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2587123"></a>
2385 </p></blockquote></div><p>
2386 Opphavsrettinnehaverne tok kabelselskapene til retten. Høyesterett fant to
2387 ganger at kabelselskaper ikke skyldte opphavsrettinnehaverne noen ting.
2389 It took Congress almost thirty years before it resolved the question of
2390 whether cable companies had to pay for the content they "pirated." In the
2391 end, Congress resolved this question in the same way that it resolved the
2392 question about record players and player pianos. Yes, cable companies would
2393 have to pay for the content that they broadcast; but the price they would
2394 have to pay was not set by the copyright owner. The price was set by law,
2395 so that the broadcasters couldn't exercise veto power over the emerging
2396 technologies of cable. Cable companies thus built their empire in part upon
2397 a "piracy" of the value created by broadcasters' content.
2399 These separate stories sing a common theme. If "piracy" means using value
2400 from someone else's creative property without permission from that
2401 creator
—as it is increasingly described today
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2587110" href=
"#ftn.id2587110" class=
"footnote">69</a>]
</sup> — then
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>every
</em></span> industry
2402 affected by copyright today is the product and beneficiary of a certain kind
2403 of piracy. Film, records, radio, cable TV. . . . The list is long and could
2404 well be expanded. Every generation welcomes the pirates from the last. Every
2405 generation
—until now.
2406 </p></div><div class=
"footnotes"><br><hr width=
"100" align=
"left"><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2586364" href=
"#id2586364" class=
"para">51</a>]
</sup>
2408 I am grateful to Peter DiMauro for pointing me to this extraordinary
2409 history. See also Siva Vaidhyanathan,
<em class=
"citetitle">Copyrights and
2410 Copywrongs
</em>,
87–93, which details Edison's "adventures"
2411 with copyright and patent.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2586278"></a>
2412 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2586422" href=
"#id2586422" class=
"para">52</a>]
</sup>
2415 J. A. Aberdeen,
<em class=
"citetitle">Hollywood Renegades: The Society of Independent
2416 Motion Picture Producers
</em> (Cobblestone Entertainment,
2000) and
2417 expanded texts posted at "The Edison Movie Monopoly: The Motion Picture
2418 Patents Company vs. the Independent Outlaws," available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
11</a>. For a discussion of
2419 the economic motive behind both these limits and the limits imposed by
2420 Victor on phonographs, see Randal C. Picker, "From Edison to the Broadcast
2421 Flag: Mechanisms of Consent and Refusal and the Propertization of Copyright"
2422 (September
2002), University of Chicago Law School, James M. Olin Program in
2423 Law and Economics, Working Paper No.
159.
</p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2586470" href=
"#id2586470" class=
"para">53</a>]
</sup>
2426 Marc Wanamaker, "The First Studios,"
<em class=
"citetitle">The Silents
2427 Majority
</em>, arkivert på
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
12</a>.
2428 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2586580" href=
"#id2586580" class=
"para">54</a>]
</sup>
2431 To Amend and Consolidate the Acts Respecting Copyright: Hearings on S.
6330
2432 and H.R.
19853 Before the ( Joint) Committees on Patents,
59th Cong.
59,
1st
2433 sess. (
1906) (statement of Senator Alfred B. Kittredge, of South Dakota,
2434 chairman), reprinted in
<em class=
"citetitle">Legislative History of the Copyright
2435 Act
</em>, E. Fulton Brylawski and Abe Goldman, eds. (South
2436 Hackensack, N.J.: Rothman Reprints,
1976).
2437 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2586602" href=
"#id2586602" class=
"para">55</a>]
</sup>
2440 To Amend and Consolidate the Acts Respecting Copyright,
223 (statement of
2441 Nathan Burkan, attorney for the Music Publishers Association).
2442 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2586613" href=
"#id2586613" class=
"para">56</a>]
</sup>
2445 To Amend and Consolidate the Acts Respecting Copyright,
226 (statement of
2446 Nathan Burkan, attorney for the Music Publishers Association).
2447 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2586624" href=
"#id2586624" class=
"para">57</a>]
</sup>
2450 To Amend and Consolidate the Acts Respecting Copyright,
23 (statement of
2451 John Philip Sousa, composer).
2452 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2586642" href=
"#id2586642" class=
"para">58</a>]
</sup>
2456 To Amend and Consolidate the Acts Respecting Copyright,
283–84
2457 (statement of Albert Walker, representative of the Auto-Music Perforating
2458 Company of New York).
2459 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2586647" href=
"#id2586647" class=
"para">59</a>]
</sup>
2462 To Amend and Consolidate the Acts Respecting Copyright,
376 (prepared
2463 memorandum of Philip Mauro, general patent counsel of the American
2464 Graphophone Company Association).
2465 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2586388" href=
"#id2586388" class=
"para">60</a>]
</sup>
2469 Copyright Law Revision: Hearings on S.
2499, S.
2900, H.R.
243, and
2470 H.R.
11794 Before the ( Joint) Committee on Patents,
60th Cong.,
1st sess.,
2471 217 (
1908) (statement of Senator Reed Smoot, chairman), reprinted in
2472 <em class=
"citetitle">Legislative History of the
1909 Copyright Act
</em>,
2473 E. Fulton Brylawski and Abe Goldman, eds. (South Hackensack, N.J.: Rothman
2475 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2586787" href=
"#id2586787" class=
"para">61</a>]
</sup>
2478 Copyright Law Revision: Report to Accompany H.R.
2512, House Committee on
2479 the Judiciary,
90th Cong.,
1st sess., House Document no.
83, (
8 March
2480 1967). I am grateful to Glenn Brown for drawing my attention to this report.
</p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2586823" href=
"#id2586823" class=
"para">62</a>]
</sup>
2482 See
17 <em class=
"citetitle">United States Code
</em>, sections
106 and
110. At
2483 the beginning, record companies printed "Not Licensed for Radio Broadcast"
2484 and other messages purporting to restrict the ability to play a record on a
2485 radio station. Judge Learned Hand rejected the argument that a warning
2486 attached to a record might restrict the rights of the radio station. See
2487 <em class=
"citetitle">RCA Manufacturing
2488 Co
</em>. v.
<em class=
"citetitle">Whiteman
</em>,
114 F.
2d
86 (
2nd
2489 Cir.
1940). See also Randal C. Picker, "From Edison to the Broadcast Flag:
2490 Mechanisms of Consent and Refusal and the Propertization of Copyright,"
2491 <em class=
"citetitle">University of Chicago Law Review
</em> 70 (
2003):
281.
2492 <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2586848"></a> <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2586857"></a>
2493 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2587003" href=
"#id2587003" class=
"para">63</a>]
</sup>
2496 Copyright Law Revision
—CATV: Hearing on S.
1006 Before the
2497 Subcommittee on Patents, Trademarks, and Copyrights of the Senate Committee
2498 on the Judiciary,
89th Cong.,
2nd sess.,
78 (
1966) (statement of Rosel
2499 H. Hyde, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission).
2500 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2587018" href=
"#id2587018" class=
"para">64</a>]
</sup>
2503 Copyright Law Revision
—CATV,
116 (statement of Douglas A. Anello,
2504 general counsel of the National Association of Broadcasters).
2505 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2587036" href=
"#id2587036" class=
"para">65</a>]
</sup>
2508 Copyright Law Revision
—CATV,
126 (statement of Ernest W. Jennes,
2509 general counsel of the Association of Maximum Service Telecasters, Inc.).
2510 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2587060" href=
"#id2587060" class=
"para">66</a>]
</sup>
2513 Copyright Law Revision
—CATV,
169 (joint statement of Arthur B. Krim,
2514 president of United Artists Corp., and John Sinn, president of United
2515 Artists Television, Inc.).
2516 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2587078" href=
"#id2587078" class=
"para">67</a>]
</sup>
2519 Copyright Law Revision
—CATV,
209 (vitnemål fra Charlton Heston,
2520 president i Screen Actors Guild).
2521 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2587104" href=
"#id2587104" class=
"para">68</a>]
</sup>
2523 Copyright Law Revision
—CATV,
216 (statement of Edwin M. Zimmerman,
2524 acting assistant attorney general).
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2587083"></a>
2525 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2587110" href=
"#id2587110" class=
"para">69</a>]
</sup>
2528 See, for example, National Music Publisher's Association,
<em class=
"citetitle">The
2529 Engine of Free Expression: Copyright on the Internet
—The Myth of Free
2530 Information
</em>, available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
13</a>. "The threat of
2531 piracy
—the use of someone else's creative work without permission or
2532 compensation
—has grown with the Internet."
2533 </p></div></div></div><div class=
"chapter" title='Kapittel
6. Kapittel fem:
"Piratvirksomhet"'
><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h2 class=
"title"><a name=
"piracy"></a>Kapittel
6. Kapittel fem: "Piratvirksomhet"
</h2></div></div></div><div class=
"toc"><p><b>Innholdsfortegnelse
</b></p><dl><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#piracy-i">Piracy I
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#piracy-ii">Piracy II
</a></span></dt></dl></div><p>
2534 There is piracy of copyrighted material. Lots of it. This piracy comes in
2535 many forms. The most significant is commercial piracy, the unauthorized
2536 taking of other people's content within a commercial context. Despite the
2537 many justifications that are offered in its defense, this taking is
2538 wrong. No one should condone it, and the law should stop it.
2541 But as well as copy-shop piracy, there is another kind of "taking" that is
2542 more directly related to the Internet. That taking, too, seems wrong to
2543 many, and it is wrong much of the time. Before we paint this taking
2544 "piracy," however, we should understand its nature a bit more. For the harm
2545 of this taking is significantly more ambiguous than outright copying, and
2546 the law should account for that ambiguity, as it has so often done in the
2549 </p><div class=
"section" title=
"Piracy I"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h2 class=
"title" style=
"clear: both"><a name=
"piracy-i"></a>Piracy I
</h2></div></div></div><p>
2550 All across the world, but especially in Asia and Eastern Europe, there are
2551 businesses that do nothing but take others people's copyrighted content,
2552 copy it, and sell it
—all without the permission of a copyright
2553 owner. The recording industry estimates that it loses about $
4.6 billion
2554 every year to physical piracy
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2587187" href=
"#ftn.id2587187" class=
"footnote">70</a>]
</sup> (that
2555 works out to one in three CDs sold worldwide). The MPAA estimates that it
2556 loses $
3 billion annually worldwide to piracy.
2558 This is piracy plain and simple. Nothing in the argument of this book, nor
2559 in the argument that most people make when talking about the subject of this
2560 book, should draw into doubt this simple point: This piracy is wrong.
2562 Which is not to say that excuses and justifications couldn't be made for
2563 it. We could, for example, remind ourselves that for the first one hundred
2564 years of the American Republic, America did not honor foreign copyrights. We
2565 were born, in this sense, a pirate nation. It might therefore seem
2566 hypocritical for us to insist so strongly that other developing nations
2567 treat as wrong what we, for the first hundred years of our existence,
2570 That excuse isn't terribly strong. Technically, our law did not ban the
2571 taking of foreign works. It explicitly limited itself to American
2572 works. Thus the American publishers who published foreign works without the
2573 permission of foreign authors were not violating any rule. The copy shops
2574 in Asia, by contrast, are violating Asian law. Asian law does protect
2575 foreign copyrights, and the actions of the copy shops violate that law. So
2576 the wrong of piracy that they engage in is not just a moral wrong, but a
2577 legal wrong, and not just an internationally legal wrong, but a locally
2578 legal wrong as well.
2581 True, these local rules have, in effect, been imposed upon these
2582 countries. No country can be part of the world economy and choose not to
2583 protect copyright internationally. We may have been born a pirate nation,
2584 but we will not allow any other nation to have a similar childhood.
2586 If a country is to be treated as a sovereign, however, then its laws are its
2587 laws regardless of their source. The international law under which these
2588 nations live gives them some opportunities to escape the burden of
2589 intellectual property law.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2587312" href=
"#ftn.id2587312" class=
"footnote">71</a>]
</sup> In my view,
2590 more developing nations should take advantage of that opportunity, but when
2591 they don't, then their laws should be respected. And under the laws of these
2592 nations, this piracy is wrong.
2594 Alternatively, we could try to excuse this piracy by noting that in any
2595 case, it does no harm to the industry. The Chinese who get access to
2596 American CDs at
50 cents a copy are not people who would have bought those
2597 American CDs at $
15 a copy. So no one really has any less money than they
2598 otherwise would have had.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2587357" href=
"#ftn.id2587357" class=
"footnote">72</a>]
</sup>
2600 This is often true (though I have friends who have purchased many thousands
2601 of pirated DVDs who certainly have enough money to pay for the content they
2602 have taken), and it does mitigate to some degree the harm caused by such
2603 taking. Extremists in this debate love to say, "You wouldn't go into Barnes
2604 & Noble and take a book off of the shelf without paying; why should it
2605 be any different with on-line music?" The difference is, of course, that
2606 when you take a book from Barnes
& Noble, it has one less book to
2607 sell. By contrast, when you take an MP3 from a computer network, there is
2608 not one less CD that can be sold. The physics of piracy of the intangible
2609 are different from the physics of piracy of the tangible.
2612 This argument is still very weak. However, although copyright is a property
2613 right of a very special sort, it
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>is
</em></span> a property
2614 right. Like all property rights, the copyright gives the owner the right to
2615 decide the terms under which content is shared. If the copyright owner
2616 doesn't want to sell, she doesn't have to. There are exceptions: important
2617 statutory licenses that apply to copyrighted content regardless of the wish
2618 of the copyright owner. Those licenses give people the right to "take"
2619 copyrighted content whether or not the copyright owner wants to sell. But
2620 where the law does not give people the right to take content, it is wrong to
2621 take that content even if the wrong does no harm. If we have a property
2622 system, and that system is properly balanced to the technology of a time,
2623 then it is wrong to take property without the permission of a property
2624 owner. That is exactly what "property" means.
2626 Finally, we could try to excuse this piracy with the argument that the
2627 piracy actually helps the copyright owner. When the Chinese "steal" Windows,
2628 that makes the Chinese dependent on Microsoft. Microsoft loses the value of
2629 the software that was taken. But it gains users who are used to life in the
2630 Microsoft world. Over time, as the nation grows more wealthy, more and more
2631 people will buy software rather than steal it. And hence over time, because
2632 that buying will benefit Microsoft, Microsoft benefits from the piracy. If
2633 instead of pirating Microsoft Windows, the Chinese used the free GNU/Linux
2634 operating system, then these Chinese users would not eventually be buying
2635 Microsoft. Without piracy, then, Microsoft would lose.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2587452"></a> <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2587459"></a>
2636 <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2587470"></a>
2638 This argument, too, is somewhat true. The addiction strategy is a good
2639 one. Many businesses practice it. Some thrive because of it. Law students,
2640 for example, are given free access to the two largest legal databases. The
2641 companies marketing both hope the students will become so used to their
2642 service that they will want to use it and not the other when they become
2643 lawyers (and must pay high subscription fees).
2645 Still, the argument is not terribly persuasive. We don't give the alcoholic
2646 a defense when he steals his first beer, merely because that will make it
2647 more likely that he will buy the next three. Instead, we ordinarily allow
2648 businesses to decide for themselves when it is best to give their product
2649 away. If Microsoft fears the competition of GNU/Linux, then Microsoft can
2650 give its product away, as it did, for example, with Internet Explorer to
2651 fight Netscape. A property right means giving the property owner the right
2652 to say who gets access to what
—at least ordinarily. And if the law
2653 properly balances the rights of the copyright owner with the rights of
2654 access, then violating the law is still wrong.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2587235"></a>
2658 Thus, while I understand the pull of these justifications for piracy, and I
2659 certainly see the motivation, in my view, in the end, these efforts at
2660 justifying commercial piracy simply don't cut it. This kind of piracy is
2661 rampant and just plain wrong. It doesn't transform the content it steals; it
2662 doesn't transform the market it competes in. It merely gives someone access
2663 to something that the law says he should not have. Nothing has changed to
2664 draw that law into doubt. This form of piracy is flat out wrong.
2666 But as the examples from the four chapters that introduced this part
2667 suggest, even if some piracy is plainly wrong, not all "piracy" is. Or at
2668 least, not all "piracy" is wrong if that term is understood in the way it is
2669 increasingly used today. Many kinds of "piracy" are useful and productive,
2670 to produce either new content or new ways of doing business. Neither our
2671 tradition nor any tradition has ever banned all "piracy" in that sense of
2674 This doesn't mean that there are no questions raised by the latest piracy
2675 concern, peer-to-peer file sharing. But it does mean that we need to
2676 understand the harm in peer-to-peer sharing a bit more before we condemn it
2677 to the gallows with the charge of piracy.
2679 For (
1) like the original Hollywood, p2p sharing escapes an overly
2680 controlling industry; and (
2) like the original recording industry, it
2681 simply exploits a new way to distribute content; but (
3) unlike cable TV, no
2682 one is selling the content that is shared on p2p services.
2684 These differences distinguish p2p sharing from true piracy. They should push
2685 us to find a way to protect artists while enabling this sharing to survive.
2686 </p></div><div class=
"section" title=
"Piracy II"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h2 class=
"title" style=
"clear: both"><a name=
"piracy-ii"></a>Piracy II
</h2></div></div></div><p>
2688 The key to the "piracy" that the law aims to quash is a use that "rob[s] the
2689 author of [his] profit."
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2587570" href=
"#ftn.id2587570" class=
"footnote">73</a>]
</sup> This means we
2690 must determine whether and how much p2p sharing harms before we know how
2691 strongly the law should seek to either prevent it or find an alternative to
2692 assure the author of his profit.
2694 Peer-to-peer sharing was made famous by Napster. But the inventors of the
2695 Napster technology had not made any major technological innovations. Like
2696 every great advance in innovation on the Internet (and, arguably, off the
2697 Internet as well
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2587594" href=
"#ftn.id2587594" class=
"footnote">74</a>]
</sup>), Shawn Fanning and
2698 crew had simply put together components that had been developed
2699 independently.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2587623"></a>
2701 The result was spontaneous combustion. Launched in July
1999, Napster
2702 amassed over
10 million users within nine months. After eighteen months,
2703 there were close to
80 million registered users of the system.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2587636" href=
"#ftn.id2587636" class=
"footnote">75</a>]
</sup> Courts quickly shut Napster down, but other
2704 services emerged to take its place. (Kazaa is currently the most popular p2p
2705 service. It boasts over
100 million members.) These services' systems are
2706 different architecturally, though not very different in function: Each
2707 enables users to make content available to any number of other users. With a
2708 p2p system, you can share your favorite songs with your best friend
—
2709 or your
20,
000 best friends.
2711 According to a number of estimates, a huge proportion of Americans have
2712 tasted file-sharing technology. A study by Ipsos-Insight in September
2002
2713 estimated that
60 million Americans had downloaded music
—28 percent of
2714 Americans older than
12.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2587672" href=
"#ftn.id2587672" class=
"footnote">76</a>]
</sup> A survey by
2715 the NPD group quoted in
<em class=
"citetitle">The New York Times
</em> estimated
2716 that
43 million citizens used file-sharing networks to exchange content in
2717 May
2003.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2587700" href=
"#ftn.id2587700" class=
"footnote">77</a>]
</sup> The vast majority of these
2718 are not kids. Whatever the actual figure, a massive quantity of content is
2719 being "taken" on these networks. The ease and inexpensiveness of
2720 file-sharing networks have inspired millions to enjoy music in a way that
2723 Some of this enjoying involves copyright infringement. Some of it does
2724 not. And even among the part that is technically copyright infringement,
2725 calculating the actual harm to copyright owners is more complicated than one
2726 might think. So consider
—a bit more carefully than the polarized
2727 voices around this debate usually do
—the kinds of sharing that file
2728 sharing enables, and the kinds of harm it entails.
2732 Fildelerne deler ulike typer innhold. Vi kan derel disse ulike typene inn i
2734 </p><div class=
"orderedlist"><ol class=
"orderedlist" type=
"A"><li class=
"listitem"><p>
2736 There are some who use sharing networks as substitutes for purchasing
2737 content. Thus, when a new Madonna CD is released, rather than buying the CD,
2738 these users simply take it. We might quibble about whether everyone who
2739 takes it would actually have bought it if sharing didn't make it available
2740 for free. Most probably wouldn't have, but clearly there are some who
2741 would. The latter are the target of category A: users who download instead
2742 of purchasing.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2587754"></a>
2743 </p></li><li class=
"listitem"><p>
2746 There are some who use sharing networks to sample music before purchasing
2747 it. Thus, a friend sends another friend an MP3 of an artist he's not heard
2748 of. The other friend then buys CDs by that artist. This is a kind of
2749 targeted advertising, quite likely to succeed. If the friend recommending
2750 the album gains nothing from a bad recommendation, then one could expect
2751 that the recommendations will actually be quite good. The net effect of this
2752 sharing could increase the quantity of music purchased.
2753 </p></li><li class=
"listitem"><p>
2756 There are many who use sharing networks to get access to copyrighted content
2757 that is no longer sold or that they would not have purchased because the
2758 transaction costs off the Net are too high. This use of sharing networks is
2759 among the most rewarding for many. Songs that were part of your childhood
2760 but have long vanished from the marketplace magically appear again on the
2761 network. (One friend told me that when she discovered Napster, she spent a
2762 solid weekend "recalling" old songs. She was astonished at the range and mix
2763 of content that was available.) For content not sold, this is still
2764 technically a violation of copyright, though because the copyright owner is
2765 not selling the content anymore, the economic harm is zero
—the same
2766 harm that occurs when I sell my collection of
1960s
45-rpm records to a
2768 </p></li><li class=
"listitem"><p>
2773 Finally, there are many who use sharing networks to get access to content
2774 that is not copyrighted or that the copyright owner wants to give away.
2775 </p></li></ol></div><p>
2776 Hvordan balanserer disse ulike delingstypene?
2778 Let's start with some simple but important points. From the perspective of
2779 the law, only type D sharing is clearly legal. From the perspective of
2780 economics, only type A sharing is clearly harmful.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2587822" href=
"#ftn.id2587822" class=
"footnote">78</a>]
</sup> Type B sharing is illegal but plainly
2781 beneficial. Type C sharing is illegal, yet good for society (since more
2782 exposure to music is good) and harmless to the artist (since the work is
2783 not otherwise available). So how sharing matters on balance is a hard
2784 question to answer
—and certainly much more difficult than the current
2785 rhetoric around the issue suggests.
2787 Whether on balance sharing is harmful depends importantly on how harmful
2788 type A sharing is. Just as Edison complained about Hollywood, composers
2789 complained about piano rolls, recording artists complained about radio, and
2790 broadcasters complained about cable TV, the music industry complains that
2791 type A sharing is a kind of "theft" that is "devastating" the industry.
2793 While the numbers do suggest that sharing is harmful, how harmful is harder
2794 to reckon. It has long been the recording industry's practice to blame
2795 technology for any drop in sales. The history of cassette recording is a
2796 good example. As a study by Cap Gemini Ernst
& Young put it, "Rather
2797 than exploiting this new, popular technology, the labels fought
2798 it."
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2587866" href=
"#ftn.id2587866" class=
"footnote">79</a>]
</sup> The labels claimed that every
2799 album taped was an album unsold, and when record sales fell by
11.4 percent
2800 in
1981, the industry claimed that its point was proved. Technology was the
2801 problem, and banning or regulating technology was the answer.
2803 Yet soon thereafter, and before Congress was given an opportunity to enact
2804 regulation, MTV was launched, and the industry had a record turnaround. "In
2805 the end," Cap Gemini concludes, "the `crisis' . . . was not the fault of the
2806 tapers
—who did not [stop after MTV came into being]
—but had to a
2807 large extent resulted from stagnation in musical innovation at the major
2808 labels."
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2587904" href=
"#ftn.id2587904" class=
"footnote">80</a>]
</sup>
2810 But just because the industry was wrong before does not mean it is wrong
2811 today. To evaluate the real threat that p2p sharing presents to the industry
2812 in particular, and society in general
—or at least the society that
2813 inherits the tradition that gave us the film industry, the record industry,
2814 the radio industry, cable TV, and the VCR
—the question is not simply
2815 whether type A sharing is harmful. The question is also
2816 <span class=
"emphasis"><em>how
</em></span> harmful type A sharing is, and how beneficial the
2817 other types of sharing are.
2819 We start to answer this question by focusing on the net harm, from the
2820 standpoint of the industry as a whole, that sharing networks cause. The
2821 "net harm" to the industry as a whole is the amount by which type A sharing
2822 exceeds type B. If the record companies sold more records through sampling
2823 than they lost through substitution, then sharing networks would actually
2824 benefit music companies on balance. They would therefore have little
2825 <span class=
"emphasis"><em>static
</em></span> reason to resist them.
2828 Could that be true? Could the industry as a whole be gaining because of file
2829 sharing? Odd as that might sound, the data about CD sales actually suggest
2832 In
2002, the RIAA reported that CD sales had fallen by
8.9 percent, from
882
2833 million to
803 million units; revenues fell
6.7 percent.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2587960" href=
"#ftn.id2587960" class=
"footnote">81</a>]
</sup> This confirms a trend over the past few years. The
2834 RIAA blames Internet piracy for the trend, though there are many other
2835 causes that could account for this drop. SoundScan, for example, reports a
2836 more than
20 percent drop in the number of CDs released since
1999. That no
2837 doubt accounts for some of the decrease in sales. Rising prices could
2838 account for at least some of the loss. "From
1999 to
2001, the average price
2839 of a CD rose
7.2 percent, from $
13.04 to $
14.19."
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2588005" href=
"#ftn.id2588005" class=
"footnote">82</a>]
</sup> Competition from other forms of media could also
2840 account for some of the decline. As Jane Black of
2841 <em class=
"citetitle">BusinessWeek
</em> notes, "The soundtrack to the film
2842 <em class=
"citetitle">High Fidelity
</em> has a list price of $
18.98. You could
2843 get the whole movie [on DVD] for $
19.99."
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2588038" href=
"#ftn.id2588038" class=
"footnote">83</a>]
</sup>
2848 But let's assume the RIAA is right, and all of the decline in CD sales is
2849 because of Internet sharing. Here's the rub: In the same period that the
2850 RIAA estimates that
803 million CDs were sold, the RIAA estimates that
2.1
2851 billion CDs were downloaded for free. Thus, although
2.6 times the total
2852 number of CDs sold were downloaded for free, sales revenue fell by just
6.7
2855 There are too many different things happening at the same time to explain
2856 these numbers definitively, but one conclusion is unavoidable: The recording
2857 industry constantly asks, "What's the difference between downloading a song
2858 and stealing a CD?"
—but their own numbers reveal the difference. If I
2859 steal a CD, then there is one less CD to sell. Every taking is a lost
2860 sale. But on the basis of the numbers the RIAA provides, it is absolutely
2861 clear that the same is not true of downloads. If every download were a lost
2862 sale
—if every use of Kazaa "rob[bed] the author of [his]
2863 profit"
—then the industry would have suffered a
100 percent drop in
2864 sales last year, not a
7 percent drop. If
2.6 times the number of CDs sold
2865 were downloaded for free, and yet sales revenue dropped by just
6.7 percent,
2866 then there is a huge difference between "downloading a song and stealing a
2869 These are the harms
—alleged and perhaps exaggerated but, let's assume,
2870 real. What of the benefits? File sharing may impose costs on the recording
2871 industry. What value does it produce in addition to these costs?
2873 One benefit is type C sharing
—making available content that is
2874 technically still under copyright but is no longer commercially available.
2875 This is not a small category of content. There are millions of tracks that
2876 are no longer commercially available.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2588061" href=
"#ftn.id2588061" class=
"footnote">84</a>]
</sup>
2877 And while it's conceivable that some of this content is not available
2878 because the artist producing the content doesn't want it to be made
2879 available, the vast majority of it is unavailable solely because the
2880 publisher or the distributor has decided it no longer makes economic sense
2881 <span class=
"emphasis"><em>to the company
</em></span> to make it available.
2883 In real space
—long before the Internet
—the market had a simple
2884 response to this problem: used book and record stores. There are thousands
2885 of used book and used record stores in America today.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2588118" href=
"#ftn.id2588118" class=
"footnote">85</a>]
</sup> These stores buy content from owners, then sell the
2886 content they buy. And under American copyright law, when they buy and sell
2887 this content,
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>even if the content is still under
2888 copyright
</em></span>, the copyright owner doesn't get a dime. Used book and
2889 record stores are commercial entities; their owners make money from the
2890 content they sell; but as with cable companies before statutory licensing,
2891 they don't have to pay the copyright owner for the content they sell.
2892 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2588165"></a><p>
2893 Type C sharing, then, is very much like used book stores or used record
2894 stores. It is different, of course, because the person making the content
2895 available isn't making money from making the content available. It is also
2896 different, of course, because in real space, when I sell a record, I don't
2897 have it anymore, while in cyberspace, when someone shares my
1949 recording
2898 of Bernstein's "Two Love Songs," I still have it. That difference would
2899 matter economically if the owner of the copyright were selling the record in
2900 competition to my sharing. But we're talking about the class of content that
2901 is not currently commercially available. The Internet is making it
2902 available, through cooperative sharing, without competing with the market.
2904 It may well be, all things considered, that it would be better if the
2905 copyright owner got something from this trade. But just because it may well
2906 be better, it doesn't follow that it would be good to ban used book
2907 stores. Or put differently, if you think that type C sharing should be
2908 stopped, do you think that libraries and used book stores should be shut as
2912 Finally, and perhaps most importantly, file-sharing networks enable type D
2913 sharing to occur
—the sharing of content that copyright owners want to
2914 have shared or for which there is no continuing copyright. This sharing
2915 clearly benefits authors and society. Science fiction author Cory Doctorow,
2916 for example, released his first novel,
<em class=
"citetitle">Down and Out in the Magic
2917 Kingdom
</em>, both free on-line and in bookstores on the same
2918 day. His (and his publisher's) thinking was that the on-line distribution
2919 would be a great advertisement for the "real" book. People would read part
2920 on-line, and then decide whether they liked the book or not. If they liked
2921 it, they would be more likely to buy it. Doctorow's content is type D
2922 content. If sharing networks enable his work to be spread, then both he and
2923 society are better off. (Actually, much better off: It is a great book!)
2925 Likewise for work in the public domain: This sharing benefits society with
2926 no legal harm to authors at all. If efforts to solve the problem of type A
2927 sharing destroy the opportunity for type D sharing, then we lose something
2928 important in order to protect type A content.
2930 The point throughout is this: While the recording industry understandably
2931 says, "This is how much we've lost," we must also ask, "How much has society
2932 gained from p2p sharing? What are the efficiencies? What is the content that
2933 otherwise would be unavailable?"
2935 For unlike the piracy I described in the first section of this chapter, much
2936 of the "piracy" that file sharing enables is plainly legal and good. And
2937 like the piracy I described in chapter
4, much of this piracy is motivated
2938 by a new way of spreading content caused by changes in the technology of
2939 distribution. Thus, consistent with the tradition that gave us Hollywood,
2940 radio, the recording industry, and cable TV, the question we should be
2941 asking about file sharing is how best to preserve its benefits while
2942 minimizing (to the extent possible) the wrongful harm it causes artists. The
2943 question is one of balance. The law should seek that balance, and that
2944 balance will be found only with time.
2946 Men er ikke krigen bare en krig mot ulovlig deling? Er ikke angrepsmålet
2947 bare det du kaller type A-deling?
2949 You would think. And we should hope. But so far, it is not. The effect of
2950 the war purportedly on type A sharing alone has been felt far beyond that
2951 one class of sharing. That much is obvious from the Napster case
2952 itself. When Napster told the district court that it had developed a
2953 technology to block the transfer of
99.4 percent of identified infringing
2954 material, the district court told counsel for Napster
99.4 percent was not
2955 good enough. Napster had to push the infringements "down to
2956 zero."
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2588268" href=
"#ftn.id2588268" class=
"footnote">86</a>]
</sup>
2958 If
99.4 percent is not good enough, then this is a war on file-sharing
2959 technologies, not a war on copyright infringement. There is no way to assure
2960 that a p2p system is used
100 percent of the time in compliance with the
2961 law, any more than there is a way to assure that
100 percent of VCRs or
100
2962 percent of Xerox machines or
100 percent of handguns are used in compliance
2963 with the law. Zero tolerance means zero p2p. The court's ruling means that
2964 we as a society must lose the benefits of p2p, even for the totally legal
2965 and beneficial uses they serve, simply to assure that there are zero
2966 copyright infringements caused by p2p.
2968 Zero tolerance has not been our history. It has not produced the content
2969 industry that we know today. The history of American law has been a process
2970 of balance. As new technologies changed the way content was distributed, the
2971 law adjusted, after some time, to the new technology. In this adjustment,
2972 the law sought to ensure the legitimate rights of creators while protecting
2973 innovation. Sometimes this has meant more rights for creators. Sometimes
2976 So, as we've seen, when "mechanical reproduction" threatened the interests
2977 of composers, Congress balanced the rights of composers against the
2978 interests of the recording industry. It granted rights to composers, but
2979 also to the recording artists: Composers were to be paid, but at a price set
2980 by Congress. But when radio started broadcasting the recordings made by
2981 these recording artists, and they complained to Congress that their
2982 "creative property" was not being respected (since the radio station did not
2983 have to pay them for the creativity it broadcast), Congress rejected their
2984 claim. An indirect benefit was enough.
2986 Cable TV followed the pattern of record albums. When the courts rejected the
2987 claim that cable broadcasters had to pay for the content they rebroadcast,
2988 Congress responded by giving broadcasters a right to compensation, but at a
2989 level set by the law. It likewise gave cable companies the right to the
2990 content, so long as they paid the statutory price.
2995 This compromise, like the compromise affecting records and player pianos,
2996 served two important goals
—indeed, the two central goals of any
2997 copyright legislation. First, the law assured that new innovators would have
2998 the freedom to develop new ways to deliver content. Second, the law assured
2999 that copyright holders would be paid for the content that was
3000 distributed. One fear was that if Congress simply required cable TV to pay
3001 copyright holders whatever they demanded for their content, then copyright
3002 holders associated with broadcasters would use their power to stifle this
3003 new technology, cable. But if Congress had permitted cable to use
3004 broadcasters' content for free, then it would have unfairly subsidized
3005 cable. Thus Congress chose a path that would assure
3006 <span class=
"emphasis"><em>compensation
</em></span> without giving the past (broadcasters)
3007 control over the future (cable).
3008 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2588371"></a><p>
3009 In the same year that Congress struck this balance, two major producers and
3010 distributors of film content filed a lawsuit against another technology, the
3011 video tape recorder (VTR, or as we refer to them today, VCRs) that Sony had
3012 produced, the Betamax. Disney's and Universal's claim against Sony was
3013 relatively simple: Sony produced a device, Disney and Universal claimed,
3014 that enabled consumers to engage in copyright infringement. Because the
3015 device that Sony built had a "record" button, the device could be used to
3016 record copyrighted movies and shows. Sony was therefore benefiting from the
3017 copyright infringement of its customers. It should therefore, Disney and
3018 Universal claimed, be partially liable for that infringement.
3021 There was something to Disney's and Universal's claim. Sony did decide to
3022 design its machine to make it very simple to record television shows. It
3023 could have built the machine to block or inhibit any direct copying from a
3024 television broadcast. Or possibly, it could have built the machine to copy
3025 only if there were a special "copy me" signal on the line. It was clear that
3026 there were many television shows that did not grant anyone permission to
3027 copy. Indeed, if anyone had asked, no doubt the majority of shows would not
3028 have authorized copying. And in the face of this obvious preference, Sony
3029 could have designed its system to minimize the opportunity for copyright
3030 infringement. It did not, and for that, Disney and Universal wanted to hold
3031 it responsible for the architecture it chose.
3033 MPAA president Jack Valenti became the studios' most vocal champion. Valenti
3034 called VCRs "tapeworms." He warned, "When there are
20,
30,
40 million of
3035 these VCRs in the land, we will be invaded by millions of `tapeworms,'
3036 eating away at the very heart and essence of the most precious asset the
3037 copyright owner has, his copyright."
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2588419" href=
"#ftn.id2588419" class=
"footnote">87</a>]
</sup>
3038 "One does not have to be trained in sophisticated marketing and creative
3039 judgment," he told Congress, "to understand the devastation on the
3040 after-theater marketplace caused by the hundreds of millions of tapings that
3041 will adversely impact on the future of the creative community in this
3042 country. It is simply a question of basic economics and plain common
3043 sense."
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2588436" href=
"#ftn.id2588436" class=
"footnote">88</a>]
</sup> Indeed, as surveys would later
3044 show, percent of VCR owners had movie libraries of ten videos or
3045 more
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2588445" href=
"#ftn.id2588445" class=
"footnote">89</a>]
</sup> — a use the Court would
3046 later hold was not "fair." By "allowing VCR owners to copy freely by the
3047 means of an exemption from copyright infringementwithout creating a
3048 mechanism to compensate copyrightowners," Valenti testified, Congress would
3049 "take from the owners the very essence of their property: the exclusive
3050 right to control who may use their work, that is, who may copy it and
3051 thereby profit from its reproduction."
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2588353" href=
"#ftn.id2588353" class=
"footnote">90</a>]
</sup>
3053 It took eight years for this case to be resolved by the Supreme Court. In
3054 the interim, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes Hollywood in
3055 its jurisdiction
—leading Judge Alex Kozinski, who sits on that court,
3056 refers to it as the "Hollywood Circuit"
—held that Sony would be liable
3057 for the copyright infringement made possible by its machines. Under the
3058 Ninth Circuit's rule, this totally familiar technology
—which Jack
3059 Valenti had called "the Boston Strangler of the American film industry"
3060 (worse yet, it was a
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>Japanese
</em></span> Boston Strangler of the
3061 American film industry)
—was an illegal technology.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2588480" href=
"#ftn.id2588480" class=
"footnote">91</a>]
</sup>
3064 But the Supreme Court reversed the decision of the Ninth Circuit. And in
3065 its reversal, the Court clearly articulated its understanding of when and
3066 whether courts should intervene in such disputes. As the Court wrote,
3067 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
3068 Sound policy, as well as history, supports our consistent deference to
3069 Congress when major technological innovations alter the market for
3070 copyrighted materials. Congress has the constitutional authority and the
3071 institutional ability to accommodate fully the varied permutations of
3072 competing interests that are inevitably implicated by such new
3073 technology.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2588525" href=
"#ftn.id2588525" class=
"footnote">92</a>]
</sup>
3074 </p></blockquote></div><p>
3075 Congress was asked to respond to the Supreme Court's decision. But as with
3076 the plea of recording artists about radio broadcasts, Congress ignored the
3077 request. Congress was convinced that American film got enough, this "taking"
3078 notwithstanding. If we put these cases together, a pattern is clear:
3079 </p><div class=
"table"><a name=
"t1"></a><p class=
"title"><b>Tabell
6.1. Tabell
</b></p><div class=
"table-contents"><table summary=
"Tabell" border=
"1"><colgroup><col><col><col><col></colgroup><thead><tr><th align=
"char">CASE
</th><th align=
"char">WHOSE VALUE WAS "PIRATED"
</th><th align=
"char">RESPONSE OF THE COURTS
</th><th align=
"char">RESPONSE OF CONGRESS
</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td align=
"char">Innspillinger
</td><td align=
"char">Komponister
</td><td align=
"char">Ingen beskyttelse
</td><td align=
"char">Statutory license
</td></tr><tr><td align=
"char">Radio
</td><td align=
"char">Innspillingsartister
</td><td align=
"char">N/A
</td><td align=
"char">Ingenting
</td></tr><tr><td align=
"char">Kabel-TV
</td><td align=
"char">Kringkastere
</td><td align=
"char">Ingen beskyttelse
</td><td align=
"char">Statutory license
</td></tr><tr><td align=
"char">VCR
</td><td align=
"char">Filmskapere
</td><td align=
"char">Ingen beskyttelse
</td><td align=
"char">Ingenting
</td></tr></tbody></table></div></div><br class=
"table-break"><p>
3080 In each case throughout our history, a new technology changed the way
3081 content was distributed.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2588654" href=
"#ftn.id2588654" class=
"footnote">93</a>]
</sup> In each case,
3082 throughout our history, that change meant that someone got a "free ride" on
3083 someone else's work.
3086 In
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>none
</em></span> of these cases did either the courts or
3087 Congress eliminate all free riding. In
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>none
</em></span> of these
3088 cases did the courts or Congress insist that the law should assure that the
3089 copyright holder get all the value that his copyright created. In every
3090 case, the copyright owners complained of "piracy." In every case, Congress
3091 acted to recognize some of the legitimacy in the behavior of the "pirates."
3092 In each case, Congress allowed some new technology to benefit from content
3093 made before. It balanced the interests at stake.
3096 When you think across these examples, and the other examples that make up
3097 the first four chapters of this section, this balance makes sense. Was Walt
3098 Disney a pirate? Would doujinshi be better if creators had to ask
3099 permission? Should tools that enable others to capture and spread images as
3100 a way to cultivate or criticize our culture be better regulated? Is it
3101 really right that building a search engine should expose you to $
15 million
3102 in damages? Would it have been better if Edison had controlled film? Should
3103 every cover band have to hire a lawyer to get permission to record a song?
3105 We could answer yes to each of these questions, but our tradition has
3106 answered no. In our tradition, as the Supreme Court has stated, copyright
3107 "has never accorded the copyright owner complete control over all possible
3108 uses of his work."
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2588734" href=
"#ftn.id2588734" class=
"footnote">94</a>]
</sup> Instead, the
3109 particular uses that the law regulates have been defined by balancing the
3110 good that comes from granting an exclusive right against the burdens such an
3111 exclusive right creates. And this balancing has historically been done
3112 <span class=
"emphasis"><em>after
</em></span> a technology has matured, or settled into the mix
3113 of technologies that facilitate the distribution of content.
3115 We should be doing the same thing today. The technology of the Internet is
3116 changing quickly. The way people connect to the Internet (wires
3117 vs. wireless) is changing very quickly. No doubt the network should not
3118 become a tool for "stealing" from artists. But neither should the law become
3119 a tool to entrench one particular way in which artists (or more accurately,
3120 distributors) get paid. As I describe in some detail in the last chapter of
3121 this book, we should be securing income to artists while we allow the market
3122 to secure the most efficient way to promote and distribute content. This
3123 will require changes in the law, at least in the interim. These changes
3124 should be designed to balance the protection of the law against the strong
3125 public interest that innovation continue.
3129 This is especially true when a new technology enables a vastly superior mode
3130 of distribution. And this p2p has done. P2p technologies can be ideally
3131 efficient in moving content across a widely diverse network. Left to
3132 develop, they could make the network vastly more efficient. Yet these
3133 "potential public benefits," as John Schwartz writes in
<em class=
"citetitle">The New
3134 York Times
</em>, "could be delayed in the P2P fight."
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2588786" href=
"#ftn.id2588786" class=
"footnote">95</a>]
</sup> Yet when anyone begins to talk about "balance," the
3135 copyright warriors raise a different argument. "All this hand waving about
3136 balance and incentives," they say, "misses a fundamental point. Our
3137 content," the warriors insist, "is our
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>property
</em></span>. Why
3138 should we wait for Congress to `rebalance' our property rights? Do you have
3139 to wait before calling the police when your car has been stolen? And why
3140 should Congress deliberate at all about the merits of this theft? Do we ask
3141 whether the car thief had a good use for the car before we arrest him?"
3143 "It is
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>our property
</em></span>," the warriors insist. "And it
3144 should be protected just as any other property is protected."
3145 </p></div><div class=
"footnotes"><br><hr width=
"100" align=
"left"><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2587187" href=
"#id2587187" class=
"para">70</a>]
</sup>
3148 See IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry),
3149 <em class=
"citetitle">The Recording Industry Commercial Piracy Report
2003</em>,
3150 July
2003, available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link
3151 #
14</a>. See also Ben Hunt, "Companies Warned on Music Piracy Risk,"
3152 <em class=
"citetitle">Financial Times
</em>,
14 February
2003,
11.
3153 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2587312" href=
"#id2587312" class=
"para">71</a>]
</sup>
3155 See Peter Drahos with John Braithwaite, Information Feudalism:
3156 <em class=
"citetitle">Who Owns the Knowledge Economy?
</em> (New York: The New
3157 Press,
2003),
10–13,
209. The Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual
3158 Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement obligates member nations to create
3159 administrative and enforcement mechanisms for intellectual property rights,
3160 a costly proposition for developing countries. Additionally, patent rights
3161 may lead to higher prices for staple industries such as agriculture. Critics
3162 of TRIPS question the disparity between burdens imposed upon developing
3163 countries and benefits conferred to industrialized nations. TRIPS does
3164 permit governments to use patents for public, noncommercial uses without
3165 first obtaining the patent holder's permission. Developing nations may be
3166 able to use this to gain the benefits of foreign patents at lower
3167 prices. This is a promising strategy for developing nations within the TRIPS
3168 framework.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2586648"></a>
3169 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2587357" href=
"#id2587357" class=
"para">72</a>]
</sup>
3171 For an analysis of the economic impact of copying technology, see Stan
3172 Liebowitz,
<em class=
"citetitle">Rethinking the Network Economy
</em> (New York:
3173 Amacom,
2002),
144–90. "In some instances . . . the impact of piracy
3174 on the copyright holder's ability to appropriate the value of the work will
3175 be negligible. One obvious instance is the case where the individual
3176 engaging in pirating would not have purchased an original even if pirating
3177 were not an option." Ibid.,
149.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2587321"></a>
3178 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2587570" href=
"#id2587570" class=
"para">73</a>]
</sup>
3181 <em class=
"citetitle">Bach
</em> v.
<em class=
"citetitle">Longman
</em>,
98
3182 Eng. Rep.
1274 (
1777).
3183 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2587594" href=
"#id2587594" class=
"para">74</a>]
</sup>
3185 See Clayton M. Christensen,
<em class=
"citetitle">The Innovator's Dilemma: The
3186 Revolutionary National Bestseller That Changed the Way We Do
3187 Business
</em> (New York: HarperBusiness,
2000). Professor Christensen
3188 examines why companies that give rise to and dominate a product area are
3189 frequently unable to come up with the most creative, paradigm-shifting uses
3190 for their own products. This job usually falls to outside innovators, who
3191 reassemble existing technology in inventive ways. For a discussion of
3192 Christensen's ideas, see Lawrence Lessig,
<em class=
"citetitle">Future
</em>,
3193 89–92,
139.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2587366"></a>
3194 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2587636" href=
"#id2587636" class=
"para">75</a>]
</sup>
3197 See Carolyn Lochhead, "Silicon Valley Dream, Hollywood Nightmare,"
3198 <em class=
"citetitle">San Francisco Chronicle
</em>,
24 September
2002, A1; "Rock
3199 'n' Roll Suicide,"
<em class=
"citetitle">New Scientist
</em>,
6 July
2002,
42;
3200 Benny Evangelista, "Napster Names CEO, Secures New Financing,"
3201 <em class=
"citetitle">San Francisco Chronicle
</em>,
23 May
2003, C1; "Napster's
3202 Wake-Up Call,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Economist
</em>,
24 June
2000,
23; John
3203 Naughton, "Hollywood at War with the Internet" (London)
3204 <em class=
"citetitle">Times
</em>,
26 July
2002,
18.
3205 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2587672" href=
"#id2587672" class=
"para">76</a>]
</sup>
3209 See Ipsos-Insight,
<em class=
"citetitle">TEMPO: Keeping Pace with Online Music
3210 Distribution
</em> (September
2002), reporting that
28 percent of
3211 Americans aged twelve and older have downloaded music off of the Internet
3212 and
30 percent have listened to digital music files stored on their
3214 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2587700" href=
"#id2587700" class=
"para">77</a>]
</sup>
3217 Amy Harmon, "Industry Offers a Carrot in Online Music Fight,"
<em class=
"citetitle">New
3218 York Times
</em>,
6 June
2003, A1.
3219 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2587822" href=
"#id2587822" class=
"para">78</a>]
</sup>
3221 See Liebowitz,
<em class=
"citetitle">Rethinking the Network Economy
</em>,
3222 148–49.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2587612"></a>
3223 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2587866" href=
"#id2587866" class=
"para">79</a>]
</sup>
3226 See Cap Gemini Ernst
& Young,
<em class=
"citetitle">Technology Evolution and the
3227 Music Industry's Business Model Crisis
</em> (
2003),
3. This report
3228 describes the music industry's effort to stigmatize the budding practice of
3229 cassette taping in the
1970s, including an advertising campaign featuring a
3230 cassette-shape skull and the caption "Home taping is killing music." At the
3231 time digital audio tape became a threat, the Office of Technical Assessment
3232 conducted a survey of consumer behavior. In
1988,
40 percent of consumers
3233 older than ten had taped music to a cassette format. U.S. Congress, Office
3234 of Technology Assessment,
<em class=
"citetitle">Copyright and Home Copying: Technology
3235 Challenges the Law
</em>, OTA-CIT-
422 (Washington, D.C.: U.S.
3236 Government Printing Office, October
1989),
145–56.
</p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2587904" href=
"#id2587904" class=
"para">80</a>]
</sup>
3239 U.S. Congress,
<em class=
"citetitle">Copyright and Home Copying
</em>,
4.
3240 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2587960" href=
"#id2587960" class=
"para">81</a>]
</sup>
3243 See Recording Industry Association of America,
<em class=
"citetitle">2002 Yearend
3244 Statistics
</em>, available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
15</a>. A later report
3245 indicates even greater losses. See Recording Industry Association of
3246 America,
<em class=
"citetitle">Some Facts About Music Piracy
</em>,
25 June
2003,
3247 available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
16</a>:
3248 "In the past four years, unit shipments of recorded music have fallen by
26
3249 percent from
1.16 billion units in to
860 million units in
2002 in the
3250 United States (based on units shipped). In terms of sales, revenues are
3251 down
14 percent, from $
14.6 billion in to $
12.6 billion last year (based on
3252 U.S. dollar value of shipments). The music industry worldwide has gone from
3253 a $
39 billion industry in
2000 down to a $
32 billion industry in
2002 (based
3254 on U.S. dollar value of shipments)."
3255 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2588005" href=
"#id2588005" class=
"para">82</a>]
</sup>
3256 Jane Black, "Big Music's Broken Record," BusinessWeek online,
13. februar
3257 2003, tilgjengelig fra
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link
3258 #
17</a>.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2588019"></a>
3259 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2588038" href=
"#id2588038" class=
"para">83</a>]
</sup>
3263 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2588061" href=
"#id2588061" class=
"para">84</a>]
</sup>
3266 By one estimate,
75 percent of the music released by the major labels is no
3267 longer in print. See Online Entertainment and Copyright Law
—Coming
3268 Soon to a Digital Device Near You: Hearing Before the Senate Committee on
3269 the Judiciary,
107th Cong.,
1st sess. (
3 April
2001) (prepared statement of
3270 the Future of Music Coalition), available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
18</a>.
3271 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2588118" href=
"#id2588118" class=
"para">85</a>]
</sup>
3274 While there are not good estimates of the number of used record stores in
3275 existence, in
2002, there were
7,
198 used book dealers in the United States,
3276 an increase of
20 percent since
1993. See Book Hunter Press,
<em class=
"citetitle">The
3277 Quiet Revolution: The Expansion of the Used Book Market
</em> (
2002),
3278 available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link
3279 #
19</a>. Used records accounted for $
260 million in sales in
2002. See
3280 National Association of Recording Merchandisers, "
2002 Annual Survey
3281 Results," available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link
3283 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2588268" href=
"#id2588268" class=
"para">86</a>]
</sup>
3286 See Transcript of Proceedings, In Re: Napster Copyright Litigation at
34-
35
3287 (N.D. Cal.,
11 July
2001), nos. MDL-
00-
1369 MHP, C
99-
5183 MHP, available at
3288 <a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
21</a>. For an account
3289 of the litigation and its toll on Napster, see Joseph Menn,
<em class=
"citetitle">All
3290 the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning's Napster
</em> (New
3291 York: Crown Business,
2003),
269–82.
3292 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2588419" href=
"#id2588419" class=
"para">87</a>]
</sup>
3295 Copyright Infringements (Audio and Video Recorders): Hearing on S.
1758
3296 Before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary,
97th Cong.,
1st and
2nd sess.,
3297 459 (
1982) (testimony of Jack Valenti, president, Motion Picture Association
3299 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2588436" href=
"#id2588436" class=
"para">88</a>]
</sup>
3302 Copyright Infringements (Audio and Video Recorders),
475.
3303 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2588445" href=
"#id2588445" class=
"para">89</a>]
</sup>
3306 <em class=
"citetitle">Universal City Studios, Inc
</em>. v.
<em class=
"citetitle">Sony
3307 Corp. of America
</em>,
480 F. Supp.
429, (C.D. Cal.,
1979).
3308 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2588353" href=
"#id2588353" class=
"para">90</a>]
</sup>
3311 Copyright Infringements (Audio and Video Recorders),
485 (testimony of Jack
3313 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2588480" href=
"#id2588480" class=
"para">91</a>]
</sup>
3316 <em class=
"citetitle">Universal City Studios, Inc
</em>. v.
<em class=
"citetitle">Sony
3317 Corp. of America
</em>,
659 F.
2d
963 (
9th Cir.
1981).
3318 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2588525" href=
"#id2588525" class=
"para">92</a>]
</sup>
3321 <em class=
"citetitle">Sony Corp. of America
</em> v.
<em class=
"citetitle">Universal City
3322 Studios, Inc
</em>.,
464 U.S.
417,
431 (
1984).
3323 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2588654" href=
"#id2588654" class=
"para">93</a>]
</sup>
3325 These are the most important instances in our history, but there are other
3326 cases as well. The technology of digital audio tape (DAT), for example, was
3327 regulated by Congress to minimize the risk of piracy. The remedy Congress
3328 imposed did burden DAT producers, by taxing tape sales and controlling the
3329 technology of DAT. See Audio Home Recording Act of
1992 (Title
17 of the
3330 <em class=
"citetitle">United States Code
</em>), Pub. L. No.
102-
563,
106 Stat.
3331 4237, codified at
17 U.S.C. §
1001. Again, however, this regulation did not
3332 eliminate the opportunity for free riding in the sense I've described. See
3333 Lessig,
<em class=
"citetitle">Future
</em>,
71. See also Picker, "From Edison to
3334 the Broadcast Flag,"
<em class=
"citetitle">University of Chicago Law Review
</em>
3335 70 (
2003):
293–96.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2588291"></a>
3336 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2588734" href=
"#id2588734" class=
"para">94</a>]
</sup>
3339 <em class=
"citetitle">Sony Corp. of America
</em> v.
<em class=
"citetitle">Universal City
3340 Studios, Inc
</em>.,
464 U.S.
417, (
1984).
3341 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2588786" href=
"#id2588786" class=
"para">95</a>]
</sup>
3344 John Schwartz, "New Economy: The Attack on Peer-to-Peer Software Echoes Past
3345 Efforts,"
<em class=
"citetitle">New York Times
</em>,
22 September
2003, C3.
3346 </p></div></div></div></div><div class=
"part" title='Del II.
"Eiendom"'
><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h1 class=
"title"><a name=
"c-property"></a>Del II. "Eiendom"
</h1></div></div></div><div class=
"partintro" title='
"Eiendom"'
><div></div><p>
3350 The copyright warriors are right: A copyright is a kind of property. It can
3351 be owned and sold, and the law protects against its theft. Ordinarily, the
3352 copyright owner gets to hold out for any price he wants. Markets reckon the
3353 supply and demand that partially determine the price she can get.
3355 But in ordinary language, to call a copyright a "property" right is a bit
3356 misleading, for the property of copyright is an odd kind of property.
3357 Indeed, the very idea of property in any idea or any expression is very
3358 odd. I understand what I am taking when I take the picnic table you put in
3359 your backyard. I am taking a thing, the picnic table, and after I take it,
3360 you don't have it. But what am I taking when I take the good
3361 <span class=
"emphasis"><em>idea
</em></span> you had to put a picnic table in the
3362 backyard
—by, for example, going to Sears, buying a table, and putting
3363 it in my backyard? What is the thing I am taking then?
3365 The point is not just about the thingness of picnic tables versus ideas,
3366 though that's an important difference. The point instead is that in the
3367 ordinary case
—indeed, in practically every case except for a narrow
3368 range of exceptions
—ideas released to the world are free. I don't take
3369 anything from you when I copy the way you dress
—though I might seem
3370 weird if I did it every day, and especially weird if you are a
3371 woman. Instead, as Thomas Jefferson said (and as is especially true when I
3372 copy the way someone else dresses), "He who receives an idea from me,
3373 receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his
3374 taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2588860" href=
"#ftn.id2588860" class=
"footnote">96</a>]
</sup>
3376 The exceptions to free use are ideas and expressions within the reach of the
3377 law of patent and copyright, and a few other domains that I won't discuss
3378 here. Here the law says you can't take my idea or expression without my
3379 permission: The law turns the intangible into property.
3381 But how, and to what extent, and in what form
—the details, in other
3382 words
—matter. To get a good sense of how this practice of turning the
3383 intangible into property emerged, we need to place this "property" in its
3384 proper context.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2588905" href=
"#ftn.id2588905" class=
"footnote">97</a>]
</sup>
3386 My strategy in doing this will be the same as my strategy in the preceding
3387 part. I offer four stories to help put the idea of "copyright material is
3388 property" in context. Where did the idea come from? What are its limits? How
3389 does it function in practice? After these stories, the significance of this
3390 true statement
—"copyright material is property"
— will be a bit
3391 more clear, and its implications will be revealed as quite different from
3392 the implications that the copyright warriors would have us draw.
3393 </p><div class=
"toc"><p><b>Innholdsfortegnelse
</b></p><dl><dt><span class=
"chapter"><a href=
"#founders">7. Kapittel seks: Grunnleggerne
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"chapter"><a href=
"#recorders">8. Kapittel sju: Innspillerne
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"chapter"><a href=
"#transformers">9. Kapittel åtte: Omformere
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"chapter"><a href=
"#collectors">10. Kapittel ni: Samlere
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"chapter"><a href=
"#property-i">11. Kapittel ti:
"Eiendom"</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#hollywood">Hvorfor Hollywood har rett
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#beginnings">Opphav
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#lawduration">Loven: Varighet
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#lawscope">Loven: Virkeområde
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#lawreach">Lov og arkitektur: Rekkevidde
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#lawforce">Arkitektur og lov: Makt
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#marketconcentration">Marked: Konsentrasjon
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#together">Sammen
</a></span></dt></dl></dd></dl></div><div class=
"footnotes"><br><hr width=
"100" align=
"left"><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2588860" href=
"#id2588860" class=
"para">96</a>]
</sup>
3396 Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson (
13 August
1813) in
3397 <em class=
"citetitle">The Writings of Thomas Jefferson
</em>, vol.
6 (Andrew
3398 A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, eds.,
1903),
330,
333–34.
3399 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2588905" href=
"#id2588905" class=
"para">97</a>]
</sup>
3402 As the legal realists taught American law, all property rights are
3403 intangible. A property right is simply a right that an individual has
3404 against the world to do or not do certain things that may or may not attach
3405 to a physical object. The right itself is intangible, even if the object to
3406 which it is (metaphorically) attached is tangible. See Adam Mossoff, "What
3407 Is Property? Putting the Pieces Back Together,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Arizona Law
3408 Review
</em> 45 (
2003):
373,
429 n.
241.
3409 </p></div></div></div><div class=
"chapter" title=
"Kapittel 7. Kapittel seks: Grunnleggerne"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h2 class=
"title"><a name=
"founders"></a>Kapittel
7. Kapittel seks: Grunnleggerne
</h2></div></div></div><p>
3410 William Shakespeare skrev
<em class=
"citetitle">Romeo og Julie
</em> i
3411 1595. Skuespillet ble først utgitt i
1597. Det var det ellevte store
3412 skuespillet Shakespeare hadde skrevet. Han fortsatte å skrive skuespill helt
3413 til
1613, og stykkene han skrevhar fortsatt å definere angloamerikansk
3414 kultur siden. Så dypt har verkene av en
1500-talls forfatter sunket inn i
3415 vår kultur at vi ofte ikke engang kjenner kilden. Jeg overhørte en gang noen
3416 som kommentere Kenneth Branaghs utgave av Henry V: "Jeg likte det, men
3417 Shakespeare er så full av klisjeer."
3420 I
1774, nesten
180 år etter at
<em class=
"citetitle">Romeo og Julie
</em> ble
3421 skrevet, mente mange at "opphavsretten" kun tilhørte én eneste utgiver i
3422 London, John Tonson.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2588980" href=
"#ftn.id2588980" class=
"footnote">98</a>]
</sup> Tonson var den
3423 mest fremstående av en liten gruppe utgivere kalt "the Conger"
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2589010" href=
"#ftn.id2589010" class=
"footnote">99</a>]
</sup>, som kontrollerte boksalget i England gjennom hele
3424 1700-tallet. The Conger hevdet at de hadde en evigvarende rett over "kopier"
3425 av bøker de hadde fått av forfatterne. Denne evigvarende retten innebar at
3426 ingen andre kunne publisere kopier av disse bøkene. Slik ble prisen på
3427 klassiske bøker holdt oppe; alle konkurrenter som lagde bedre eller
3428 billigere utgaver, ble fjernet.
3430 Men altså, det er noe spennende med året
1774 for alle som vet litt om
3431 opphavsretts-lovgivning. Det mest kjente året for opphavsrett er
1710, da
3432 det britiske parlamentet vedtok den første loven. Denne loven er kjent som
3433 "Statute of Anne" og sa at alle publiserte verk skulle være beskyttet i
3434 fjorten år, en periode som kunne fornyes én gang dersom forfatteren ennå
3435 levde, og at alle verk publisert i eller før
1710 skulle ha en ekstraperiode
3436 på
22 tillegsår.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2589048" href=
"#ftn.id2589048" class=
"footnote">100</a>]
</sup> På grunn av denne
3437 loven, så skulle
<em class=
"citetitle">Rome og Julie
</em> ha falt i det fri i
3438 1731. Hvordan kunne da Tonson fortsatt ha kontroll over verket i
1774?
3440 The reason is that the English hadn't yet agreed on what a "copyright"
3441 was
—indeed, no one had. At the time the English passed the Statute of
3442 Anne, there was no other legislation governing copyrights. The last law
3443 regulating publishers, the Licensing Act of
1662, had expired in
1695. That
3444 law gave publishers a monopoly over publishing, as a way to make it easier
3445 for the Crown to control what was published. But after it expired, there
3446 was no positive law that said that the publishers, or "Stationers," had an
3447 exclusive right to print books.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2588869"></a>
3449 At det ikke fantes noen
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>positiv
</em></span> lov, betydde ikke at
3450 det ikke fantes noen lov. Den anglo-amerikanske juridiske tradisjon ser både
3451 til lover skapt av politikere (det lovgivende statsorgen)og til lover
3452 (prejudikater) skapt av domstolene for å bestemme hvordan folket skal
3453 leve. Vi kaller politikernes lover for positiv lov og vi kaller lovene fra
3454 dommerne sedvanerett."Common law" angir bakgrunnen for de lovgivendes
3455 lovgivning; retten til lovgiving, vanligvis kan trumfe at bakgrunnen bare
3456 hvis det går gjennom en lov til å forskyve den. Og så var det virkelige
3457 spørsmålet etter lisensiering lover hadde utløpt om felles lov beskyttet
3458 opphavsretten, uavhengig av lovverket positiv.
3461 Dette spørsmålet var viktig for utgiverne eller "bokselgere," som de ble
3462 kalt, fordi det var økende konkurranse fra utenlandske utgivere, Særlig fra
3463 Skottland hvor publiseringen og eksporten av bøker til England hadde økt
3464 veldig. Denne konkurransen reduserte fortjenesten til "The Conger", som
3465 derfor krevde at parlamentet igjen skulle vedta en lov for å gi dem
3466 eksklusiv kontroll over publisering. Dette kravet resulterte i "Statute of
3469 "Statute of Anne" ga forfatteren eller "eieren" av en bok en eksklusiv rett
3470 til å publisere denne boken. Men det var, til bokhandernes forferdelse en
3471 viktig begrensning, nemlig hvor lenge denne retten skulle vare. Etter dette
3472 gikk trykkeretten bort og verket falt i det fri og kunne trykkes av hvem som
3473 helst. Det var ihvertfall det lovgiverne hadde tenkt.
3475 Men nå det mest interessante med dette: Hvorfor ville parlamentet begrense
3476 trykkeretten? Sprøsmålet er ikke hvorfor de bestemte seg for denne perioden,
3477 men hvorfor ville de begrense retten
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>i det hele tatt?
</em></span>
3479 Bokhandlerne, og forfatterne som de representerte, hadde et veldig sterkt
3480 krav. Ta
<em class=
"citetitle">romeo og Julie
</em> som et eksempel: Skuespillet
3481 ble skrevet av Shakespeare. Det var hans kreativitet som brakte det til
3482 verden. Han krenket ikke noens rett da han skrev dette verket (det er en
3483 kontroversiell påstanden, men det er urelevant), og med sin egen rett skapte
3484 han verket, han gjorde det ikke noe vanskeligere for andre til å lage
3485 skuespill. Så hvorfor skulle loven tillate at noen annen kunne komme og ta
3486 Shakespeares verkuten hans, eller hans arvingers, tillatelse? Hvilke grunner
3487 finnes for å tillate at noen "stjeler" Shakespeares verk?
3489 Svaret er todel. Først må vi se på noe spesielt med oppfatningen av
3490 opphavsrett som fantes på tidspunktet da "Statute of Anne" ble
3491 vedtatt. Deretter må vi se på noe spesielt med bokhandlerne.
3494 Først om opphavsretten. I de siste tre hundre år har vi kommet til å bruke
3495 begrepet "copyright" i stadig videre forstand. Men i
1710 var det ikke så
3496 mye et konsept som det var en bestemt rett. Opphavsretten ble født som et
3497 svært spesifikt sett med begrensninger: den forbød andre å reprodusere en
3498 bok. I
1710 var "kopi-rett" en rett til å bruke en bestemt maskin til å
3499 replikere en bestemt arbeid. Den gikk ikke utover dette svært smale
3500 formålet. Den kontrollerte ikke mer generelt hvordan et verk kunne
3501 <span class=
"emphasis"><em>brukes
</em></span>. Idag inkluderer retten en stor samling av
3502 restriksjoner på andres frihet: den gir forfatteren eksklusiv rett til å
3503 kopiere, eksklusiv rett til å distribuere, eksklusiv rett til å fremføre, og
3506 Så selv om f. eks. opphavsretten til Shakespeares verker var evigvarende,
3507 betydde det under den opprinnelige betydningen av begrepet at ingen kunne
3508 trykke Shakespeares arbeid uten tillatelse fra Shakespeares arvinger. Den
3509 ville ikke ha kontrollert noe mer, for eksempel om hvordan verket kunne
3510 fremføres, om verket kunne oversettes eller om Kenneth Branagh ville hatt
3511 lov til å lage filmer. "Kopi-retten" var bare en eksklusiv rett til å
3512 trykke--ikke noe mindre, selvfølgelig, men heller ikke mer.
3514 Selv dnne begrensede retten ble møtt med skepsis av britene. De hadde hatt
3515 en lang og stygg erfaring med "eksklusive rettigheter," spesielt "enerett"
3516 gitt av kronen. Engelskmennene hadde utkjempet en borgerkrig delvis mot
3517 kronens praksis med å dele ut monopoler--spesielt monopoler for verk som
3518 allerede eksisterte. Kong Henrik VIII hadde gitt patent til å trykke Bibelen
3519 og monopol til Darcy for å lage spillkort. Det engelske parlamentet begynte
3520 å kjempe tilbake mot denne makten hos kronen. I
1656 ble "Statute of
3521 Monopolis" vedtatt for å begrense monopolene på patenter for nye
3522 oppfinnelser. Og i
1710 var parlamentet ivrig etter å håndtere det voksende
3523 monopolet på publisering.
3525 Dermed ble "kopi-retten", når den sees på som en monopolrett, en rettighet
3526 som bør være begrenset. (Uansett hvor overbevisende påstanden om at "det er
3527 min eiendom, og jeg skal ha for alltid," prøv hvor overbevisende det er når
3528 men sier "det er mitt monopol, og jeg skal ha det for alltid.") Staten ville
3529 beskytte eneretten, men bare så lenge det gavnet samfunnet. Britene så
3530 skadene særinteresserte kunne skape; de vedtok en lov for å stoppe dem.
3532 Dernest, om bokhandlerne. Det var ikke bare at kopiretten var et
3533 monopol. Det var også et monopol holdt av bokhandlerne. En bokhandler høres
3534 greie og ufarlige ut for oss, men slik var det ikke i syttenhundretallets
3535 England. Medlemmene i "the Conger" ble av en voksende mengde sett på som
3536 monopolister av verste sort - et verktøy for kronens undertrykkelse, de
3537 solgte Englands frihet mot å være garantert en monopolskinntekt. Men
3538 monopolistene ble kvast kritisert: Milton beskrev dem som "gamle
3539 patentholdere og monopolister i bokhandlerkunsten"; de var "menn som derfor
3540 ikke hadde et ærlig arbeide hvor utdanning er nødvendig."
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2589290" href=
"#ftn.id2589290" class=
"footnote">101</a>]
</sup>
3542 Mange trodde at den makten bokhandlerne utøvde over spredning av kunnskap,
3543 var til skade for selve spredningen, men på dette tidspunktet viste
3544 Opplysningen viktigheten av utdannelse og kunnskap for alle. idéen om at
3545 kunnskap burde være gratis er et kjennetegn for tiden, og disse kraftige
3546 kommersielle interesser forstyrret denne idéen.
3548 For å balansere denne makten, besluttet Parlamentet å øke konkurransen blant
3549 bokhandlerne, og den enkleste måten å gjøre det på, var å spre mengden av
3550 verdifulle bøker. Parlamentet begrenset derfor begrepet om opphavsrett, og
3551 garantert slik at verdifulle bøker ville bli frie for alle utgiver å
3552 publisere etter en begrenset periode. Slik ble det å gi eksisterende verk en
3553 periode på tjueen år et kompromiss for å bekjempe bokhandlernes
3554 makt. Begrensninger med dato var en indirekte måte å skape konkurranse
3555 mellom utgivere, og slik en skapelse og spredning av kultur.
3557 Når
1731 (
1710+
21) kom, ble bokhandlerne engstelige. De så konsekvensene av
3558 mer konkurranse, og som alle konkurrenter, likte de det ikke. Først
3559 ignorerte bokhandlere ganske enkelt "Statute of Anne", og fortsatte å kreve
3560 en evigvarende rett til å kontrollere publiseringen. Men i
1735 og
1737 de
3561 prøvde å tvinge Parlamentet til å utvide periodene. Tjueen år var ikke nok,
3562 sa de; de trengte mer tid.
3564 Parlamentet avslo kravene, Som en pamflett sa, i en vending som levere ennå
3566 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
3567 Jeg ser ingen grunn til å gi en utvidet perioden nå som ikke ville kunne gi
3568 utvidelser om igjen og om igjen, så fort de gamle utgår; så dersom dette
3569 lovforslaget blir vedtatt, vil effekten være: at et evig monopol blir skapt,
3570 et stort nederlag for handelen, et angrep mot kunnskapen, ingen fordel for
3571 forfatterne, men en stor avgift for folket; og alt dette kun for å øke
3572 bokhandlernes personlige rikdom.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2589367" href=
"#ftn.id2589367" class=
"footnote">102</a>]
</sup>
3573 </p></blockquote></div><p>
3574 Etter å ha mislyktes i Parlamentet gikk utgiverne til rettssalen i en rekke
3575 saker. Deres argument var enkelt og direkte: "Statute of Anne" ga
3576 forfatterne en viss beskyttelse gjennom positiv loven, men denne
3577 beskyttelsenvar ikke ment som en erstatning for felles lov. Istedet var de
3578 ment å supplere felles lov. Ifølge sedvanerett var det galt å ta en annen
3579 persons kreative eiendom og bruke den uten hans tillatelse. "Statute of
3580 Anne", hevdet bokhandlere, endret ikke dette faktum. Derfor betydde ikke det
3581 at beskyttelsen gitt av "Statute of Anne" utløp, at beskyttelsen fra
3582 sedvaneretten utløp: Ifølge sedvaneretten hadde de rett til å fordømme
3583 publiseringen av en bok, selv følgelig om "Statute of Anne" sa at de var
3584 falt i det fri. Dette, mente de, var den eneste måten å beskytte
3587 Dette var et godt argument, og hadde støtte fra flere av den tidens ledende
3588 jurister. Det viste også en ekstraordinær chutzpah. Inntail da, som
3589 jusprofessor Raymond Pattetson har sagt, "var utgiverne ... like bekymret
3590 for forfatterne som en gjeter for sine lam."
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2589434" href=
"#ftn.id2589434" class=
"footnote">103</a>]
</sup> Bokselgerne brydde seg ikke det spor om forfatternes
3591 rettigheter. Deres bekymring var den monopolske inntekten forfatterens verk
3594 Men bokhandlernes argument ble ikke godtatt uten kamp. Helten fra denne
3595 kampen var den skotske bokselgeren Alexander Donaldson.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2589461" href=
"#ftn.id2589461" class=
"footnote">104</a>]
</sup>
3597 Donaldson var en fremmed for Londons "the Conger". Han startet in karriere i
3598 Edinburgh i
1750. Hans forretningsidé var billige kopier av standardverk
3599 falt i det fri, ihvertfall fri ifølge "Statute of Anne".
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2589483" href=
"#ftn.id2589483" class=
"footnote">105</a>]
</sup> Donaldsons forlag vokste og ble "et sentrum for
3600 litterære skotter." "Blant dem," skriver professor Mark Rose, var "den unge
3601 James Boswell som, sammen med sin venn Andrew Erskine, publiserte en hel
3602 antologi av skotsk samtidspoesi sammen med Donaldson."
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2589502" href=
"#ftn.id2589502" class=
"footnote">106</a>]
</sup> <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2589511"></a>
3604 Da Londons bokselgere prøvde å få stengt Donaldsons butikk i Skottland, så
3605 flyttet han butikken til London. Her solgte han billige utgaver av "de mest
3606 populære, engelske bøker, i kamp mot sedvanerettens rett til litterær
3607 eiendom."
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2589528" href=
"#ftn.id2589528" class=
"footnote">107</a>]
</sup> Bøkene hans var mellom
30%
3608 og
50% billigere enn "the Conger"s, og han baserte sin rett til denne
3609 konkurransen på at bøkene, takket være "Statute of Anne", var falt i det
3612 Londons bokselgere begynte straks å slå ned mot "pirater" som
3613 Donaldson. Flere tiltak var vellykkede, den viktigste var den tidlig seieren
3614 i kampen mellom
<em class=
"citetitle">Millar
</em> og
3615 <em class=
"citetitle">Taylor
</em>.
3617 Millar var en bokhandler som i
1729 hadde kjøpt opp rettighetene til James
3618 Thomsons dikt "The Seasons". Millar hadde da full beskyttelse gjennom
3619 "Statute of Anne", men etter at denne beskyttelsen var uløpt, begynte Robert
3620 Taylor å trykke et konkurrerende bind. Millar gikk til sak, og hevdet han
3621 hadde en evig rett gjennom sedvaneretten, uansett hva "Statute of Anne"
3622 sa.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2589574" href=
"#ftn.id2589574" class=
"footnote">108</a>]
</sup>
3623 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"idxmansfield2"></a><p>
3624 Til moderne juristers forbløffelse, var en av, ikke bare datidens, men en av
3625 de største dommere i engelsk historie, Lord Mansfield, enig med
3626 bokhandlerne. Uansett hvilken beskyttelse "Statute of Anne" gav
3627 bokhandlerne, så sa han at den ikke fortrengte noe fra
3628 sedvaneretten. Spørsmålet var hvorvidt sedvaneretten beskyttet forfatterne
3629 mot pirater. Mansfield svar var ja: Sedvaneretten nektet Taylor å
3630 reprodusere Thomsons dikt uten Millars tillatelse. Slik gav sedvaneretten
3631 bokselgerne en evig publiseringsrett til bøker solgt til dem.
3634 Ser man på det som et spørsmål innen abstrakt jus - dersom man resonnere som
3635 om rettferdighet bare var logisk deduksjon fra de første bud - kunne
3636 Mansfields konklusjon gitt mening. Men den overså det Parlamentet hadde
3637 kjempet for i
1710: Hvordan man på best mulig vis kunne innskrenke
3638 utgivernes monopolmakt. Parlamentets strategi hadde vært å kjøpe fred
3639 gjennom å tilby en beskyttelsesperiode også for eksisterende verk, men
3640 perioden måtte være så kort at kulturen ble utsatt for konkurranse innen
3641 rimelig tid. Storbritannia skulle vokse fra den kontrollerte kulturen under
3642 kronen, inn i en fri og åpen kultur.
3643 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2589641"></a><p>
3644 Kampen for å forsvare "Statute of Anne"s begrensninger sluttet uansett ikke
3645 der, for nå kommer Donaldson.
3646 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2589656"></a><p>
3647 Millar døde kort tid etter sin seier. Boet hans solgte rettighetene over
3648 Thomsons dikt til et syndikat av utgivere, deriblant Thomas
3649 Beckett.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2589669" href=
"#ftn.id2589669" class=
"footnote">109</a>]
</sup> Da ga Donaldson ut en
3650 uautorisert utgave av Thomsons verk. Etter avgjørelsen i
3651 <em class=
"citetitle">Millar
</em>-saken, gikk Beckett til sak mot
3652 Donaldson. Donaldson tok saken inn for Overhuset, som da fungerte som en
3653 slags høyesterett. I februar
1774 hadde dette organet muligheten til å tolke
3654 Parlamentets mening med utøpsdatoen fra seksti år før.
3656 Rettssaken
<em class=
"citetitle">Donaldson
</em> mot
3657 <em class=
"citetitle">Beckett
</em> fikk en enorm oppmerksomhet i hele
3658 Storbritannia. Donaldsons advokater mente at selv om det før fantes en del
3659 rettigheter i sedvaneretten, så var disse fortrengt av "Statute of
3660 Anne". Etter at "Statute of Anne" var blitt vedtatt, skulle den eneste
3661 lovlige beskyttelse for trykkerett kom derfra. Og derfor, mente de, i tråd
3662 med vilkårene i "Statute of Anne", falle i det fri så fort
3663 beskyttelsesperioden var over.
3665 Overhuset var en merkelig institusjon. Juridiske spørsmål ble presentert for
3666 huset, og ble først stemt over av "juslorder", medlemmer av enspesiell
3667 rettslig gruppe som fungerte nesten slik som justiariusene i vår
3668 Høyesterett. Deretter, etter at "juslordene" hadde stemt, stemte resten av
3672 Rapportene om juslordene stemmer er uenige. På enkelte punkter ser det ut
3673 som om evigvarende beskyttelse fikk flertall. Men det er ingen tvil om
3674 hvordan resten av Overhuset stemte. Med en majoritet på to mot en (
22 mot
3675 11) stemte de ned forslaget om en evig beskyttelse. Uansett hvordan man
3676 hadde tolket sedvaneretten, var nå kopiretten begrenset til en periode, og
3677 etter denne ville verket falle i det fri.
3679 "Å falle i det fri". Før rettssaken
<em class=
"citetitle">Donaldson
</em> mot
3680 <em class=
"citetitle">Beckett
</em> var det ingen klar oppfatning om hva å falle
3681 i det fri innebar. Før
1774 var det jo en allmenn oppfatning om at
3682 kopiretten var evigvarende. Men etter
1774 ble Public Domain født.For første
3683 gang i angloamerikansk historie var den lovlige beskyttelsen av et verk
3684 utgått, og de største verk i engelsk historie - inkludert Shakespeare,
3685 Bacon, Milton, Johnson og Bunyan - var frie.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2589766"></a> <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2589772"></a> <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2589779"></a> <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2589785"></a>
3686 <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2589791"></a>
3688 Vi kan knapt forestille oss det, men denne avgjørelsen fra Overhuset fyrte
3689 opp under en svært populær og politisk reaksjon. I Skottland, hvor de fleste
3690 piratugiverne hadde holdt til, ble avgjørelsen feiret i gatene. Som
3691 <em class=
"citetitle">Edinburgh Advertiser
</em> skrev "Ingen privatsak har noen
3692 gang fått slik oppmerksomhet fra folket, og ingen sak som har blitt prøvet i
3693 Overhuset har interessert så mange enkeltmennesker." "Stor glede i Edinburgh
3694 etter seieren over litterær eiendom: bål og *illuminations*.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2589820" href=
"#ftn.id2589820" class=
"footnote">110</a>]
</sup>
3696 I London, ihvertfall blant utgiverne, var reaksjonen like sterk, men i
3697 motsatt retning.
<em class=
"citetitle">Morning Chronicle
</em> skrev:
3698 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
3699 Gjennom denne avgjørelsen ... er verdier til nesten
200 000 pund, som er
3700 blitt ærlig kjøpt gjennom allment salg, og som i går var eiendom, er nå
3701 redusert til ingenting. Bokselgerne i London og Westminster, mange av dem
3702 har solgt hus og eiendom for å kjøpe kopirettigheter, er med ett ruinerte,
3703 og mange som gjennom mange år har opparbeidet kompetanse for å brødfø
3704 familien, sitter nå uten en shilling til sine.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2589850" href=
"#ftn.id2589850" class=
"footnote">111</a>]
</sup>
3705 </p></blockquote></div><p>
3708 Ruinert er en overdrivelse. Men det er ingen overdrivelse å si at endringen
3709 var stor. Vedtaket fra Overhuset betydde at bokhandlerne ikke lenger kunnen
3710 kontrollere hvordan kulturen i England ville vokse og utvikle seg. Kulturen
3711 i England var etter dette
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>fri
</em></span>. Ikke i den betydning at
3712 kopiretten ble ignorert, for utgiverne hadde i en begrenset periode rett
3713 over trykkingen. Og heller ikke i den betydningen at bøker kunne stjeles,
3714 for selv etter at boken var falt i det fri, så måtte den kjøpes. Men
3715 <span class=
"emphasis"><em>fri
</em></span> i betydningen at kulturen og dens vekst ikke lenger
3716 var kontrollert av en liten gruppe utgivere. Som alle frie markeder, ville
3717 dette markedet vokse og utvikle seg etter tilbud og etterspørsel. Den
3718 engelske kulturen ble nå formet slik flertallet Englands lesere ville at det
3719 skulle formes - gjennom valget av hva de kjøpte og skrev, gjennom valget av
3720 *memes* de gjentok og beundret. Valg i en
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>konkurrerende
3721 sammenheng
</em></span>, ikke der hvor valgene var om hvilken kultur som
3722 skulle være tilgjengelig for folket og hvor deres tilgang til den ble styrt
3723 av noen få, på tros av flertallets ønsker.
3725 Til sist, dette var en verden hvor Parlamentet var antimonopolistisk, og
3726 holdt stand mot utgivernes krav. I en verden hvor parlamentet er lett å
3727 påvirke, vil den frie kultur være mindre beskyttet.
3728 </p><div class=
"footnotes"><br><hr width=
"100" align=
"left"><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2588980" href=
"#id2588980" class=
"para">98</a>]
</sup>
3731 Jacob Tonson er vanligvis husket for sin omgang med
1700-tallets litterære
3732 storheter, spesielt John Dryden, og for hans kjekke"ferdige versjoner" av
3733 klassiske verk. I tillegg til
<em class=
"citetitle">Romeo og Julie
</em>, utga
3734 han en utrolig rekke liste av verk som ennå er hjertet av den engelske
3735 kanon, inkludert de samlede verk av Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Milton, og
3736 John Dryden. Se Keith Walker: "Jacob Tonson, Bookseller,"
3737 <em class=
"citetitle">American Scholar
</em> 61:
3 (
1992):
424-
31.
3738 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2589010" href=
"#id2589010" class=
"para">99</a>]
</sup>
3741 Lyman Ray Patterson,
<em class=
"citetitle">Copyright in Historical
3742 Perspective
</em> (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press,
1968),
3744 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2589048" href=
"#id2589048" class=
"para">100</a>]
</sup>
3746 Som Siva Vaidhyanathan så pent argumenterer, er det feilaktige å kalle dette
3747 en "opphavsrettslov." Se Vaidhyanathan,
<em class=
"citetitle">Copyrights and
3748 Copywrongs
</em>,
40.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2589058"></a>
3749 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2589290" href=
"#id2589290" class=
"para">101</a>]
</sup>
3753 Philip Wittenberg,
<em class=
"citetitle">The Protection and Marketing of Literary
3754 Property
</em> (New York: J. Messner, Inc.,
1937),
31.
3755 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2589367" href=
"#id2589367" class=
"para">102</a>]
</sup>
3758 A Letter to a Member of Parliament concerning the Bill now depending in the
3759 House of Commons, for making more effectual an Act in the Eighth Year of the
3760 Reign of Queen Anne, entitled, An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by
3761 Vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or Purchasers of such
3762 Copies, during the Times therein mentioned (London,
1735), in Brief Amici
3763 Curiae of Tyler T. Ochoa et al.,
8,
<em class=
"citetitle">Eldred
</em>
3764 v.
<em class=
"citetitle">Ashcroft
</em>,
537 U.S.
186 (
2003) (No.
01-
618).
3765 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2589434" href=
"#id2589434" class=
"para">103</a>]
</sup>
3767 Lyman Ray Patterson, "Free Speech, Copyright, and Fair Use,"
3768 <em class=
"citetitle">Vanderbilt Law Review
</em> 40 (
1987):
28. For en
3769 fantastisk overbevisende fortelling, se Vaidhyanathan,
37–48.
3770 <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2589020"></a>
3771 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2589461" href=
"#id2589461" class=
"para">104</a>]
</sup>
3774 For a compelling account, see David Saunders,
<em class=
"citetitle">Authorship and
3775 Copyright
</em> (London: Routledge,
1992),
62–69.
3776 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2589483" href=
"#id2589483" class=
"para">105</a>]
</sup>
3779 Mark Rose,
<em class=
"citetitle">Authors and Owners
</em> (Cambridge: Harvard
3780 University Press,
1993),
92.
3781 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2589502" href=
"#id2589502" class=
"para">106</a>]
</sup>
3785 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2589528" href=
"#id2589528" class=
"para">107</a>]
</sup>
3788 Lyman Ray Patterson,
<em class=
"citetitle">Copyright in Historical
3789 Perspective
</em>,
167 (quoting Borwell).
3790 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2589574" href=
"#id2589574" class=
"para">108</a>]
</sup>
3793 Howard B. Abrams, "The Historic Foundation of American Copyright Law:
3794 Exploding the Myth of Common Law Copyright,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Wayne Law
3795 Review
</em> 29 (
1983):
1152.
3796 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2589669" href=
"#id2589669" class=
"para">109</a>]
</sup>
3800 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2589820" href=
"#id2589820" class=
"para">110</a>]
</sup>
3804 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2589850" href=
"#id2589850" class=
"para">111</a>]
</sup>
3808 </p></div></div></div><div class=
"chapter" title=
"Kapittel 8. Kapittel sju: Innspillerne"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h2 class=
"title"><a name=
"recorders"></a>Kapittel
8. Kapittel sju: Innspillerne
</h2></div></div></div><p>
3809 Jon Else is a filmmaker. He is best known for his documentaries and has been
3810 very successful in spreading his art. He is also a teacher, and as a teacher
3811 myself, I envy the loyalty and admiration that his students feel for him. (I
3812 met, by accident, two of his students at a dinner party. He was their god.)
3814 Else worked on a documentary that I was involved in. At a break, he told me
3815 a story about the freedom to create with film in America today.
3817 In
1990, Else was working on a documentary about Wagner's Ring Cycle. The
3818 focus was stagehands at the San Francisco Opera. Stagehands are a
3819 particularly funny and colorful element of an opera. During a show, they
3820 hang out below the stage in the grips' lounge and in the lighting loft. They
3821 make a perfect contrast to the art on the stage.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2589953"></a>
3824 During one of the performances, Else was shooting some stagehands playing
3825 checkers. In one corner of the room was a television set. Playing on the
3826 television set, while the stagehands played checkers and the opera company
3827 played Wagner, was
<em class=
"citetitle">The Simpsons
</em>. As Else judged it,
3828 this touch of cartoon helped capture the flavor of what was special about
3831 Years later, when he finally got funding to complete the film, Else
3832 attempted to clear the rights for those few seconds of
<em class=
"citetitle">The
3833 Simpsons
</em>. For of course, those few seconds are copyrighted; and
3834 of course, to use copyrighted material you need the permission of the
3835 copyright owner, unless "fair use" or some other privilege applies.
3837 Else called
<em class=
"citetitle">Simpsons
</em> creator Matt Groening's office
3838 to get permission. Groening approved the shot. The shot was a
3839 four-and-a-halfsecond image on a tiny television set in the corner of the
3840 room. How could it hurt? Groening was happy to have it in the film, but he
3841 told Else to contact Gracie Films, the company that produces the program.
3842 <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2589998"></a>
3844 Gracie Films was okay with it, too, but they, like Groening, wanted to be
3845 careful. So they told Else to contact Fox, Gracie's parent company. Else
3846 called Fox and told them about the clip in the corner of the one room shot
3847 of the film. Matt Groening had already given permission, Else said. He was
3848 just confirming the permission with Fox.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2590013"></a>
3850 Then, as Else told me, "two things happened. First we discovered . . . that
3851 Matt Groening doesn't own his own creation
—or at least that someone
3852 [at Fox] believes he doesn't own his own creation." And second, Fox "wanted
3853 ten thousand dollars as a licensing fee for us to use this four-point-five
3854 seconds of . . . entirely unsolicited
<em class=
"citetitle">Simpsons
</em> which
3855 was in the corner of the shot."
3857 Else was certain there was a mistake. He worked his way up to someone he
3858 thought was a vice president for licensing, Rebecca Herrera. He explained
3859 to her, "There must be some mistake here. . . . We're asking for your
3860 educational rate on this." That was the educational rate, Herrera told
3861 Else. A day or so later, Else called again to confirm what he had been told.
3864 "I wanted to make sure I had my facts straight," he told me. "Yes, you have
3865 your facts straight," she said. It would cost $
10,
000 to use the clip of
3866 <em class=
"citetitle">The Simpsons
</em> in the corner of a shot in a documentary
3867 film about Wagner's Ring Cycle. And then, astonishingly, Herrera told Else,
3868 "And if you quote me, I'll turn you over to our attorneys." As an assistant
3869 to Herrera told Else later on, "They don't give a shit. They just want the
3872 Else didn't have the money to buy the right to replay what was playing on
3873 the television backstage at the San Francisco Opera. To reproduce this
3874 reality was beyond the documentary filmmaker's budget. At the very last
3875 minute before the film was to be released, Else digitally replaced the shot
3876 with a clip from another film that he had worked on,
<em class=
"citetitle">The Day
3877 After Trinity
</em>, from ten years before.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2590070"></a> <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2590076"></a>
3879 There's no doubt that someone, whether Matt Groening or Fox, owns the
3880 copyright to
<em class=
"citetitle">The Simpsons
</em>. That copyright is their
3881 property. To use that copyrighted material thus sometimes requires the
3882 permission of the copyright owner. If the use that Else wanted to make of
3883 the
<em class=
"citetitle">Simpsons
</em> copyright were one of the uses
3884 restricted by the law, then he would need to get the permission of the
3885 copyright owner before he could use the work in that way. And in a free
3886 market, it is the owner of the copyright who gets to set the price for any
3887 use that the law says the owner gets to control.
3889 For example, "public performance" is a use of
<em class=
"citetitle">The
3890 Simpsons
</em> that the copyright owner gets to control. If you take a
3891 selection of favorite episodes, rent a movie theater, and charge for tickets
3892 to come see "My Favorite
<em class=
"citetitle">Simpsons
</em>," then you need to
3893 get permission from the copyright owner. And the copyright owner (rightly,
3894 in my view) can charge whatever she wants
—$
10 or $
1,
000,
000. That's
3895 her right, as set by the law.
3897 But when lawyers hear this story about Jon Else and Fox, their first thought
3898 is "fair use."
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2590124" href=
"#ftn.id2590124" class=
"footnote">112</a>]
</sup> Else's use of just
4.5
3899 seconds of an indirect shot of a
<em class=
"citetitle">Simpsons
</em> episode is
3900 clearly a fair use of
<em class=
"citetitle">The Simpsons
</em>—and fair use
3901 does not require the permission of anyone.
3905 So I asked Else why he didn't just rely upon "fair use." Here's his reply:
3906 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
3907 The
<em class=
"citetitle">Simpsons
</em> fiasco was for me a great lesson in the
3908 gulf between what lawyers find irrelevant in some abstract sense, and what
3909 is crushingly relevant in practice to those of us actually trying to make
3910 and broadcast documentaries. I never had any doubt that it was "clearly fair
3911 use" in an absolute legal sense. But I couldn't rely on the concept in any
3912 concrete way. Here's why:
3913 </p><div class=
"orderedlist"><ol class=
"orderedlist" type=
"1"><li class=
"listitem"><p>
3916 Before our films can be broadcast, the network requires that we buy Errors
3917 and Omissions insurance. The carriers require a detailed "visual cue sheet"
3918 listing the source and licensing status of each shot in the film. They take
3919 a dim view of "fair use," and a claim of "fair use" can grind the
3920 application process to a halt.
3921 </p></li><li class=
"listitem"><p>
3923 I probably never should have asked Matt Groening in the first place. But I
3924 knew (at least from folklore) that Fox had a history of tracking down and
3925 stopping unlicensed
<em class=
"citetitle">Simpsons
</em> usage, just as George
3926 Lucas had a very high profile litigating
<em class=
"citetitle">Star Wars
</em>
3927 usage. So I decided to play by the book, thinking that we would be granted
3928 free or cheap license to four seconds of
<em class=
"citetitle">Simpsons
</em>. As
3929 a documentary producer working to exhaustion on a shoestring, the last thing
3930 I wanted was to risk legal trouble, even nuisance legal trouble, and even to
3931 defend a principle.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2590213"></a>
3932 </p></li><li class=
"listitem"><p>
3936 I did, in fact, speak with one of your colleagues at Stanford Law School
3937 . . . who confirmed that it was fair use. He also confirmed that Fox would
3938 "depose and litigate you to within an inch of your life," regardless of the
3939 merits of my claim. He made clear that it would boil down to who had the
3940 bigger legal department and the deeper pockets, me or them.
3942 </p></li><li class=
"listitem"><p>
3945 The question of fair use usually comes up at the end of the project, when we
3946 are up against a release deadline and out of money.
3947 </p></li></ol></div></blockquote></div><p>
3948 In theory, fair use means you need no permission. The theory therefore
3949 supports free culture and insulates against a permission culture. But in
3950 practice, fair use functions very differently. The fuzzy lines of the law,
3951 tied to the extraordinary liability if lines are crossed, means that the
3952 effective fair use for many types of creators is slight. The law has the
3953 right aim; practice has defeated the aim.
3955 This practice shows just how far the law has come from its
3956 eighteenth-century roots. The law was born as a shield to protect
3957 publishers' profits against the unfair competition of a pirate. It has
3958 matured into a sword that interferes with any use, transformative or not.
3959 </p><div class=
"footnotes"><br><hr width=
"100" align=
"left"><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2590124" href=
"#id2590124" class=
"para">112</a>]
</sup>
3962 For an excellent argument that such use is "fair use," but that lawyers
3963 don't permit recognition that it is "fair use," see Richard A. Posner with
3964 William F. Patry, "Fair Use and Statutory Reform in the Wake of
3965 <em class=
"citetitle">Eldred
</em>" (draft on file with author), University of
3966 Chicago Law School, 5 August 2003.
3967 </p></div></div></div><div class="chapter
" title="Kapittel
9. Kapittel åtte: Omformere
"><div class="titlepage
"><div><div><h2 class="title
"><a name="transformers
"></a>Kapittel 9. Kapittel åtte: Omformere</h2></div></div></div><a class="indexterm
" name="id2590277
"></a><a class="indexterm
" name="id2590283
"></a><p>
3968 In 1993, Alex Alben was a lawyer working at Starwave, Inc. Starwave was an
3969 innovative company founded by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen to develop
3970 digital entertainment. Long before the Internet became popular, Starwave
3971 began investing in new technology for delivering entertainment in
3972 anticipation of the power of networks.
3973 </p><a class="indexterm
" name="id2590298
"></a><p>
3974 Alben had a special interest in new technology. He was intrigued by the
3975 emerging market for CD-ROM technology—not to distribute film, but to
3976 do things with film that otherwise would be very difficult. In 1993, he
3977 launched an initiative to develop a product to build retrospectives on the
3978 work of particular actors. The first actor chosen was Clint Eastwood. The
3979 idea was to showcase all of the work of Eastwood, with clips from his films
3980 and interviews with figures important to his career.
3981 </p><a class="indexterm
" name="id2590307
"></a><p>
3982 At that time, Eastwood had made more than fifty films, as an actor and as a
3983 director. Alben began with a series of interviews with Eastwood, asking him
3984 about his career. Because Starwave produced those interviews, it was free to
3985 include them on the CD.
3989 That alone would not have made a very interesting product, so Starwave
3990 wanted to add content from the movies in Eastwood's career: posters,
3991 scripts, and other material relating to the films Eastwood made. Most of his
3992 career was spent at Warner Brothers, and so it was relatively easy to get
3993 permission for that content.
3994 </p><a class="indexterm
" name="id2590341
"></a><p>
3995 Then Alben and his team decided to include actual film clips. "Our goal was
3996 that we were going to have a clip from every one of Eastwood's films," Alben
3997 told me. It was here that the problem arose. "No one had ever really done
3998 this before," Alben explained. "No one had ever tried to do this in the
3999 context of an artistic look at an actor's career."
4000 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2590356"></a><p>
4001 Alben brought the idea to Michael Slade, the CEO of Starwave. Slade asked,
4002 "Well, what will it take?"
4003 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2590368"></a><p>
4004 Alben replied, "Well, we're going to have to clear rights from everyone who
4005 appears in these films, and the music and everything else that we want to
4006 use in these film clips." Slade said, "Great! Go for it."
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2590380" href=
"#ftn.id2590380" class=
"footnote">113</a>]
</sup>
4008 The problem was that neither Alben nor Slade had any idea what clearing
4009 those rights would mean. Every actor in each of the films could have a claim
4010 to royalties for the reuse of that film. But CD- ROMs had not been specified
4011 in the contracts for the actors, so there was no clear way to know just what
4014 I asked Alben how he dealt with the problem. With an obvious pride in his
4015 resourcefulness that obscured the obvious bizarreness of his tale, Alben
4016 recounted just what they did:
4017 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
4018 So we very mechanically went about looking up the film clips. We made some
4019 artistic decisions about what film clips to include
—of course we were
4020 going to use the "Make my day" clip from
<em class=
"citetitle">Dirty
4021 Harry
</em>. But you then need to get the guy on the ground who's
4022 wiggling under the gun and you need to get his permission. And then you
4023 have to decide what you are going to pay him.
4027 We decided that it would be fair if we offered them the dayplayer rate for
4028 the right to reuse that performance. We're talking about a clip of less than
4029 a minute, but to reuse that performance in the CD-ROM the rate at the time
4030 was about $
600. So we had to identify the people
—some of them were
4031 hard to identify because in Eastwood movies you can't tell who's the guy
4032 crashing through the glass
—is it the actor or is it the stuntman? And
4033 then we just, we put together a team, my assistant and some others, and we
4034 just started calling people.
4035 </p></blockquote></div><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2590441"></a><p>
4036 Some actors were glad to help
—Donald Sutherland, for example, followed
4037 up himself to be sure that the rights had been cleared. Others were
4038 dumbfounded at their good fortune. Alben would ask, "Hey, can I pay you $
600
4039 or maybe if you were in two films, you know, $
1,
200?" And they would say,
4040 "Are you for real? Hey, I'd love to get $
1,
200." And some of course were a
4041 bit difficult (estranged ex-wives, in particular). But eventually, Alben and
4042 his team had cleared the rights to this retrospective CD-ROM on Clint
4045 It was one
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>year
</em></span> later
—"and even then we weren't
4046 sure whether we were totally in the clear."
4047 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2590478"></a><p>
4048 Alben is proud of his work. The project was the first of its kind and the
4049 only time he knew of that a team had undertaken such a massive project for
4050 the purpose of releasing a retrospective.
4051 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
4052 Everyone thought it would be too hard. Everyone just threw up their hands
4053 and said, "Oh, my gosh, a film, it's so many copyrights, there's the music,
4054 there's the screenplay, there's the director, there's the actors." But we
4055 just broke it down. We just put it into its constituent parts and said,
4056 "Okay, there's this many actors, this many directors, . . . this many
4057 musicians," and we just went at it very systematically and cleared the
4059 </p></blockquote></div><p>
4063 And no doubt, the product itself was exceptionally good. Eastwood loved it,
4064 and it sold very well.
4065 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2590512"></a><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2590518"></a><p>
4066 But I pressed Alben about how weird it seems that it would have to take a
4067 year's work simply to clear rights. No doubt Alben had done this
4068 efficiently, but as Peter Drucker has famously quipped, "There is nothing so
4069 useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at
4070 all."
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2590532" href=
"#ftn.id2590532" class=
"footnote">114</a>]
</sup> Did it make sense, I asked Alben,
4071 that this is the way a new work has to be made?
4073 For, as he acknowledged, "very few . . . have the time and resources, and
4074 the will to do this," and thus, very few such works would ever be made. Does
4075 it make sense, I asked him, from the standpoint of what anybody really
4076 thought they were ever giving rights for originally, that you would have to
4077 go clear rights for these kinds of clips?
4078 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
4079 I don't think so. When an actor renders a performance in a movie, he or she
4080 gets paid very well. . . . And then when
30 seconds of that performance is
4081 used in a new product that is a retrospective of somebody's career, I don't
4082 think that that person . . . should be compensated for that.
4083 </p></blockquote></div><p>
4084 Or at least, is this
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>how
</em></span> the artist should be
4085 compensated? Would it make sense, I asked, for there to be some kind of
4086 statutory license that someone could pay and be free to make derivative use
4087 of clips like this? Did it really make sense that a follow-on creator would
4088 have to track down every artist, actor, director, musician, and get explicit
4089 permission from each? Wouldn't a lot more be created if the legal part of
4090 the creative process could be made to be more clean?
4091 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
4093 Absolutely. I think that if there were some fair-licensing
4094 mechanism
—where you weren't subject to hold-ups and you weren't
4095 subject to estranged former spouses
—you'd see a lot more of this work,
4096 because it wouldn't be so daunting to try to put together a retrospective of
4097 someone's career and meaningfully illustrate it with lots of media from that
4098 person's career. You'd build in a cost as the producer of one of these
4099 things. You'd build in a cost of paying X dollars to the talent that
4100 performed. But it would be a known cost. That's the thing that trips
4101 everybody up and makes this kind of product hard to get off the ground. If
4102 you knew I have a hundred minutes of film in this product and it's going to
4103 cost me X, then you build your budget around it, and you can get investments
4104 and everything else that you need to produce it. But if you say, "Oh, I want
4105 a hundred minutes of something and I have no idea what it's going to cost
4106 me, and a certain number of people are going to hold me up for money," then
4107 it becomes difficult to put one of these things together.
4108 </p></blockquote></div><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2590612"></a><p>
4109 Alben worked for a big company. His company was backed by some of the
4110 richest investors in the world. He therefore had authority and access that
4111 the average Web designer would not have. So if it took him a year, how long
4112 would it take someone else? And how much creativity is never made just
4113 because the costs of clearing the rights are so high? These costs are the
4114 burdens of a kind of regulation. Put on a Republican hat for a moment, and
4115 get angry for a bit. The government defines the scope of these rights, and
4116 the scope defined determines how much it's going to cost to negotiate
4117 them. (Remember the idea that land runs to the heavens, and imagine the
4118 pilot purchasing flythrough rights as he negotiates to fly from Los Angeles
4119 to San Francisco.) These rights might well have once made sense; but as
4120 circumstances change, they make no sense at all. Or at least, a
4121 well-trained, regulationminimizing Republican should look at the rights and
4122 ask, "Does this still make sense?"
4125 I've seen the flash of recognition when people get this point, but only a
4126 few times. The first was at a conference of federal judges in California.
4127 The judges were gathered to discuss the emerging topic of cyber-law. I was
4128 asked to be on the panel. Harvey Saferstein, a well-respected lawyer from an
4129 L.A. firm, introduced the panel with a video that he and a friend, Robert
4130 Fairbank, had produced.
4132 Videoen var en glimrende sammenstilling av filmer fra hver periode i det
4133 tjuende århundret, rammet inn rundt idéen om en episode i TV-serien
4134 <em class=
"citetitle">60 Minutes
</em>. Utførelsen var perfekt, ned til seksti
4135 minutter stoppeklokken. Dommerne elsket enhver minutt av den.
4136 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2590666"></a><p>
4137 Da lysene kom på, kikket jeg over til min medpaneldeltager, David Nimmer,
4138 kanskje den ledende opphavsrettakademiker og utøver i nasjonen. Han hadde en
4139 forbauset uttrykk i ansiktet sitt, mens han tittet ut over rommet med over
4140 250 godt underholdte dommere. Med en en illevarslende tone, begynte han sin
4141 tale med et spørsmål: "Vet dere hvor mange føderale lover som nettopp brutt
4143 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2590686"></a><p>
4144 For of course, the two brilliantly talented creators who made this film
4145 hadn't done what Alben did. They hadn't spent a year clearing the rights to
4146 these clips; technically, what they had done violated the law. Of course,
4147 it wasn't as if they or anyone were going to be prosecuted for this
4148 violation (the presence of
250 judges and a gaggle of federal marshals
4149 notwithstanding). But Nimmer was making an important point: A year before
4150 anyone would have heard of the word Napster, and two years before another
4151 member of our panel, David Boies, would defend Napster before the Ninth
4152 Circuit Court of Appeals, Nimmer was trying to get the judges to see that
4153 the law would not be friendly to the capacities that this technology would
4154 enable. Technology means you can now do amazing things easily; but you
4155 couldn't easily do them legally.
4157 We live in a "cut and paste" culture enabled by technology. Anyone building
4158 a presentation knows the extraordinary freedom that the cut and paste
4159 architecture of the Internet created
—in a second you can find just
4160 about any image you want; in another second, you can have it planted in your
4163 But presentations are just a tiny beginning. Using the Internet and its
4164 archives, musicians are able to string together mixes of sound never before
4165 imagined; filmmakers are able to build movies out of clips on computers
4166 around the world. An extraordinary site in Sweden takes images of
4167 politicians and blends them with music to create biting political
4168 commentary. A site called Camp Chaos has produced some of the most biting
4169 criticism of the record industry that there is through the mixing of Flash!
4170 and music.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2590714"></a>
4172 All of these creations are technically illegal. Even if the creators wanted
4173 to be "legal," the cost of complying with the law is impossibly
4174 high. Therefore, for the law-abiding sorts, a wealth of creativity is never
4175 made. And for that part that is made, if it doesn't follow the clearance
4176 rules, it doesn't get released.
4178 To some, these stories suggest a solution: Let's alter the mix of rights so
4179 that people are free to build upon our culture. Free to add or mix as they
4180 see fit. We could even make this change without necessarily requiring that
4181 the "free" use be free as in "free beer." Instead, the system could simply
4182 make it easy for follow-on creators to compensate artists without requiring
4183 an army of lawyers to come along: a rule, for example, that says "the
4184 royalty owed the copyright owner of an unregistered work for the derivative
4185 reuse of his work will be a flat
1 percent of net revenues, to be held in
4186 escrow for the copyright owner." Under this rule, the copyright owner could
4187 benefit from some royalty, but he would not have the benefit of a full
4188 property right (meaning the right to name his own price) unless he registers
4191 Who could possibly object to this? And what reason would there be for
4192 objecting? We're talking about work that is not now being made; which if
4193 made, under this plan, would produce new income for artists. What reason
4194 would anyone have to oppose it?
4197 In February
2003, DreamWorks studios announced an agreement with Mike Myers,
4198 the comic genius of
<em class=
"citetitle">Saturday Night Live
</em> and Austin
4199 Powers. According to the announcement, Myers and Dream-Works would work
4200 together to form a "unique filmmaking pact." Under the agreement, DreamWorks
4201 "will acquire the rights to existing motion picture hits and classics, write
4202 new storylines and
—with the use of stateof-the-art digital
4203 technology
—insert Myers and other actors into the film, thereby
4204 creating an entirely new piece of entertainment."
4206 The announcement called this "film sampling." As Myers explained, "Film
4207 Sampling is an exciting way to put an original spin on existing films and
4208 allow audiences to see old movies in a new light. Rap artists have been
4209 doing this for years with music and now we are able to take that same
4210 concept and apply it to film." Steven Spielberg is quoted as saying, "If
4211 anyone can create a way to bring old films to new audiences, it is Mike."
4213 Spielberg is right. Film sampling by Myers will be brilliant. But if you
4214 don't think about it, you might miss the truly astonishing point about this
4215 announcement. As the vast majority of our film heritage remains under
4216 copyright, the real meaning of the DreamWorks announcement is just this: It
4217 is Mike Myers and only Mike Myers who is free to sample. Any general freedom
4218 to build upon the film archive of our culture, a freedom in other contexts
4219 presumed for us all, is now a privilege reserved for the funny and
4220 famous
—and presumably rich.
4222 This privilege becomes reserved for two sorts of reasons. The first
4223 continues the story of the last chapter: the vagueness of "fair use." Much
4224 of "sampling" should be considered "fair use." But few would rely upon so
4225 weak a doctrine to create. That leads to the second reason that the
4226 privilege is reserved for the few: The costs of negotiating the legal rights
4227 for the creative reuse of content are astronomically high. These costs
4228 mirror the costs with fair use: You either pay a lawyer to defend your fair
4229 use rights or pay a lawyer to track down permissions so you don't have to
4230 rely upon fair use rights. Either way, the creative process is a process of
4231 paying lawyers
—again a privilege, or perhaps a curse, reserved for the
4233 </p><div class=
"footnotes"><br><hr width=
"100" align=
"left"><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2590380" href=
"#id2590380" class=
"para">113</a>]
</sup>
4235 Technically, the rights that Alben had to clear were mainly those of
4236 publicity
—rights an artist has to control the commercial exploitation
4237 of his image. But these rights, too, burden "Rip, Mix, Burn" creativity, as
4238 this chapter evinces.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2590309"></a>
4239 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2590532" href=
"#id2590532" class=
"para">114</a>]
</sup>
4242 U.S. Department of Commerce Office of Acquisition Management,
4243 <em class=
"citetitle">Seven Steps to Performance-Based Services
4244 Acquisition
</em>, available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
22</a>.
4245 </p></div></div></div><div class=
"chapter" title=
"Kapittel 10. Kapittel ni: Samlere"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h2 class=
"title"><a name=
"collectors"></a>Kapittel
10. Kapittel ni: Samlere
</h2></div></div></div><p>
4246 In April
1996, millions of "bots"
—computer codes designed to "spider,"
4247 or automatically search the Internet and copy content
—began running
4248 across the Net. Page by page, these bots copied Internet-based information
4249 onto a small set of computers located in a basement in San Francisco's
4250 Presidio. Once the bots finished the whole of the Internet, they started
4251 again. Over and over again, once every two months, these bits of code took
4252 copies of the Internet and stored them.
4254 By October
2001, the bots had collected more than five years of copies. And
4255 at a small announcement in Berkeley, California, the archive that these
4256 copies created, the Internet Archive, was opened to the world. Using a
4257 technology called "the Way Back Machine," you could enter a Web page, and
4258 see all of its copies going back to
1996, as well as when those pages
4261 This is the thing about the Internet that Orwell would have appreciated. In
4262 the dystopia described in
<em class=
"citetitle">1984</em>, old newspapers were
4263 constantly updated to assure that the current view of the world, approved of
4264 by the government, was not contradicted by previous news reports.
4268 Thousands of workers constantly reedited the past, meaning there was no way
4269 ever to know whether the story you were reading today was the story that was
4270 printed on the date published on the paper.
4272 It's the same with the Internet. If you go to a Web page today, there's no
4273 way for you to know whether the content you are reading is the same as the
4274 content you read before. The page may seem the same, but the content could
4275 easily be different. The Internet is Orwell's library
—constantly
4276 updated, without any reliable memory.
4278 Until the Way Back Machine, at least. With the Way Back Machine, and the
4279 Internet Archive underlying it, you can see what the Internet was. You have
4280 the power to see what you remember. More importantly, perhaps, you also have
4281 the power to find what you don't remember and what others might prefer you
4282 forget.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2590885" href=
"#ftn.id2590885" class=
"footnote">115</a>]
</sup>
4284 We take it for granted that we can go back to see what we remember
4285 reading. Think about newspapers. If you wanted to study the reaction of your
4286 hometown newspaper to the race riots in Watts in
1965, or to Bull Connor's
4287 water cannon in
1963, you could go to your public library and look at the
4288 newspapers. Those papers probably exist on microfiche. If you're lucky, they
4289 exist in paper, too. Either way, you are free, using a library, to go back
4290 and remember
—not just what it is convenient to remember, but remember
4291 something close to the truth.
4293 It is said that those who fail to remember history are doomed to repeat
4294 it. That's not quite correct. We
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>all
</em></span> forget
4295 history. The key is whether we have a way to go back to rediscover what we
4296 forget. More directly, the key is whether an objective past can keep us
4297 honest. Libraries help do that, by collecting content and keeping it, for
4298 schoolchildren, for researchers, for grandma. A free society presumes this
4302 The Internet was an exception to this presumption. Until the Internet
4303 Archive, there was no way to go back. The Internet was the quintessentially
4304 transitory medium. And yet, as it becomes more important in forming and
4305 reforming society, it becomes more and more important to maintain in some
4306 historical form. It's just bizarre to think that we have scads of archives
4307 of newspapers from tiny towns around the world, yet there is but one copy of
4308 the Internet
—the one kept by the Internet Archive.
4310 Brewster Kahle is the founder of the Internet Archive. He was a very
4311 successful Internet entrepreneur after he was a successful computer
4312 researcher. In the
1990s, Kahle decided he had had enough business
4313 success. It was time to become a different kind of success. So he launched
4314 a series of projects designed to archive human knowledge. The Internet
4315 Archive was just the first of the projects of this Andrew Carnegie of the
4316 Internet. By December of
2002, the archive had over
10 billion pages, and it
4317 was growing at about a billion pages a month.
4319 The Way Back Machine is the largest archive of human knowledge in human
4320 history. At the end of
2002, it held "two hundred and thirty terabytes of
4321 material"
—and was "ten times larger than the Library of Congress." And
4322 this was just the first of the archives that Kahle set out to build. In
4323 addition to the Internet Archive, Kahle has been constructing the Television
4324 Archive. Television, it turns out, is even more ephemeral than the
4325 Internet. While much of twentieth-century culture was constructed through
4326 television, only a tiny proportion of that culture is available for anyone
4327 to see today. Three hours of news are recorded each evening by Vanderbilt
4328 University
—thanks to a specific exemption in the copyright law. That
4329 content is indexed, and is available to scholars for a very low fee. "But
4330 other than that, [television] is almost unavailable," Kahle told me. "If you
4331 were Barbara Walters you could get access to [the archives], but if you are
4332 just a graduate student?" As Kahle put it,
4333 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
4335 Do you remember when Dan Quayle was interacting with Murphy Brown? Remember
4336 that back and forth surreal experience of a politician interacting with a
4337 fictional television character? If you were a graduate student wanting to
4338 study that, and you wanted to get those original back and forth exchanges
4339 between the two, the
<em class=
"citetitle">60 Minutes
</em> episode that came out
4340 after it . . . it would be almost impossible. . . . Those materials are
4341 almost unfindable. . . .
4342 </p></blockquote></div><p>
4343 Why is that? Why is it that the part of our culture that is recorded in
4344 newspapers remains perpetually accessible, while the part that is recorded
4345 on videotape is not? How is it that we've created a world where researchers
4346 trying to understand the effect of media on nineteenthcentury America will
4347 have an easier time than researchers trying to understand the effect of
4348 media on twentieth-century America?
4350 In part, this is because of the law. Early in American copyright law,
4351 copyright owners were required to deposit copies of their work in
4352 libraries. These copies were intended both to facilitate the spread of
4353 knowledge and to assure that a copy of the work would be around once the
4354 copyright expired, so that others might access and copy the work.
4356 These rules applied to film as well. But in
1915, the Library of Congress
4357 made an exception for film. Film could be copyrighted so long as such
4358 deposits were made. But the filmmaker was then allowed to borrow back the
4359 deposits
—for an unlimited time at no cost. In
1915 alone, there were
4360 more than
5,
475 films deposited and "borrowed back." Thus, when the
4361 copyrights to films expire, there is no copy held by any library. The copy
4362 exists
—if it exists at all
—in the library archive of the film
4363 company.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2590950" href=
"#ftn.id2590950" class=
"footnote">116</a>]
</sup>
4365 The same is generally true about television. Television broadcasts were
4366 originally not copyrighted
—there was no way to capture the broadcasts,
4367 so there was no fear of "theft." But as technology enabled capturing,
4368 broadcasters relied increasingly upon the law. The law required they make a
4369 copy of each broadcast for the work to be "copyrighted." But those copies
4370 were simply kept by the broadcasters. No library had any right to them; the
4371 government didn't demand them. The content of this part of American culture
4372 is practically invisible to anyone who would look.
4375 Kahle was eager to correct this. Before September
11,
2001, he and his
4376 allies had started capturing television. They selected twenty stations from
4377 around the world and hit the Record button. After September
11, Kahle,
4378 working with dozens of others, selected twenty stations from around the
4379 world and, beginning October
11,
2001, made their coverage during the week
4380 of September
11 available free on-line. Anyone could see how news reports
4381 from around the world covered the events of that day.
4383 Kahle had the same idea with film. Working with Rick Prelinger, whose
4384 archive of film includes close to
45,
000 "ephemeral films" (meaning films
4385 other than Hollywood movies, films that were never copyrighted), Kahle
4386 established the Movie Archive. Prelinger let Kahle digitize
1,
300 films in
4387 this archive and post those films on the Internet to be downloaded for
4388 free. Prelinger's is a for-profit company. It sells copies of these films as
4389 stock footage. What he has discovered is that after he made a significant
4390 chunk available for free, his stock footage sales went up
4391 dramatically. People could easily find the material they wanted to use. Some
4392 downloaded that material and made films on their own. Others purchased
4393 copies to enable other films to be made. Either way, the archive enabled
4394 access to this important part of our culture. Want to see a copy of the
4395 "Duck and Cover" film that instructed children how to save themselves in the
4396 middle of nuclear attack? Go to archive.org, and you can download the film
4397 in a few minutes
—for free.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2591057"></a>
4399 Here again, Kahle is providing access to a part of our culture that we
4400 otherwise could not get easily, if at all. It is yet another part of what
4401 defines the twentieth century that we have lost to history. The law doesn't
4402 require these copies to be kept by anyone, or to be deposited in an archive
4403 by anyone. Therefore, there is no simple way to find them.
4405 The key here is access, not price. Kahle wants to enable free access to this
4406 content, but he also wants to enable others to sell access to it. His aim is
4407 to ensure competition in access to this important part of our culture. Not
4408 during the commercial life of a bit of creative property, but during a
4409 second life that all creative property has
—a noncommercial life.
4412 For here is an idea that we should more clearly recognize. Every bit of
4413 creative property goes through different "lives." In its first life, if the
4414 creator is lucky, the content is sold. In such cases the commercial market
4415 is successful for the creator. The vast majority of creative property
4416 doesn't enjoy such success, but some clearly does. For that content,
4417 commercial life is extremely important. Without this commercial market,
4418 there would be, many argue, much less creativity.
4420 After the commercial life of creative property has ended, our tradition has
4421 always supported a second life as well. A newspaper delivers the news every
4422 day to the doorsteps of America. The very next day, it is used to wrap fish
4423 or to fill boxes with fragile gifts or to build an archive of knowledge
4424 about our history. In this second life, the content can continue to inform
4425 even if that information is no longer sold.
4427 The same has always been true about books. A book goes out of print very
4428 quickly (the average today is after about a year
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2591156" href=
"#ftn.id2591156" class=
"footnote">117</a>]
</sup>). After it is out of print, it can be sold in used book stores
4429 without the copyright owner getting anything and stored in libraries, where
4430 many get to read the book, also for free. Used book stores and libraries are
4431 thus the second life of a book. That second life is extremely important to
4432 the spread and stability of culture.
4434 Yet increasingly, any assumption about a stable second life for creative
4435 property does not hold true with the most important components of popular
4436 culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. For
4437 these
—television, movies, music, radio, the Internet
—there is no
4438 guarantee of a second life. For these sorts of culture, it is as if we've
4439 replaced libraries with Barnes
& Noble superstores. With this culture,
4440 what's accessible is nothing but what a certain limited market demands.
4441 Beyond that, culture disappears.
4444 For most of the twentieth century, it was economics that made this so. It
4445 would have been insanely expensive to collect and make accessible all
4446 television and film and music: The cost of analog copies is extraordinarily
4447 high. So even though the law in principle would have restricted the ability
4448 of a Brewster Kahle to copy culture generally, the real restriction was
4449 economics. The market made it impossibly difficult to do anything about this
4450 ephemeral culture; the law had little practical effect.
4452 Perhaps the single most important feature of the digital revolution is that
4453 for the first time since the Library of Alexandria, it is feasible to
4454 imagine constructing archives that hold all culture produced or distributed
4455 publicly. Technology makes it possible to imagine an archive of all books
4456 published, and increasingly makes it possible to imagine an archive of all
4457 moving images and sound.
4459 The scale of this potential archive is something we've never imagined
4460 before. The Brewster Kahles of our history have dreamed about it; but we are
4461 for the first time at a point where that dream is possible. As Kahle
4463 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
4464 It looks like there's about two to three million recordings of music.
4465 Ever. There are about a hundred thousand theatrical releases of movies,
4466 . . . and about one to two million movies [distributed] during the twentieth
4467 century. There are about twenty-six million different titles of books. All
4468 of these would fit on computers that would fit in this room and be able to
4469 be afforded by a small company. So we're at a turning point in our
4470 history. Universal access is the goal. And the opportunity of leading a
4471 different life, based on this, is . . . thrilling. It could be one of the
4472 things humankind would be most proud of. Up there with the Library of
4473 Alexandria, putting a man on the moon, and the invention of the printing
4475 </p></blockquote></div><p>
4477 Kahle is not the only librarian. The Internet Archive is not the only
4478 archive. But Kahle and the Internet Archive suggest what the future of
4479 libraries or archives could be.
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>When
</em></span> the commercial
4480 life of creative property ends, I don't know. But it does. And whenever it
4481 does, Kahle and his archive hint at a world where this knowledge, and
4482 culture, remains perpetually available. Some will draw upon it to understand
4483 it; some to criticize it. Some will use it, as Walt Disney did, to re-create
4484 the past for the future. These technologies promise something that had
4485 become unimaginable for much of our past
—a future
4486 <span class=
"emphasis"><em>for
</em></span> our past. The technology of digital arts could make
4487 the dream of the Library of Alexandria real again.
4489 Technologists have thus removed the economic costs of building such an
4490 archive. But lawyers' costs remain. For as much as we might like to call
4491 these "archives," as warm as the idea of a "library" might seem, the
4492 "content" that is collected in these digital spaces is also someone's
4493 "property." And the law of property restricts the freedoms that Kahle and
4494 others would exercise.
4495 </p><div class=
"footnotes"><br><hr width=
"100" align=
"left"><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2590885" href=
"#id2590885" class=
"para">115</a>]
</sup>
4498 The temptations remain, however. Brewster Kahle reports that the White House
4499 changes its own press releases without notice. A May
13,
2003, press release
4500 stated, "Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended." That was later changed,
4501 without notice, to "Major Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended." E-mail from
4502 Brewster Kahle,
1 December
2003.
4503 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2590950" href=
"#id2590950" class=
"para">116</a>]
</sup>
4506 Doug Herrick, "Toward a National Film Collection: Motion Pictures at the
4507 Library of Congress,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Film Library Quarterly
</em> 13
4508 nos.
2–3 (
1980):
5; Anthony Slide,
<em class=
"citetitle">Nitrate Won't Wait: A
4509 History of Film Preservation in the United States
</em> ( Jefferson,
4510 N.C.: McFarland
& Co.,
1992),
36.
4511 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2591156" href=
"#id2591156" class=
"para">117</a>]
</sup>
4514 Dave Barns, "Fledgling Career in Antique Books: Woodstock Landlord, Bar
4515 Owner Starts a New Chapter by Adopting Business,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Chicago
4516 Tribune
</em>,
5 September
1997, at Metro Lake
1L. Of books published
4517 between
1927 and
1946, only
2.2 percent were in print in
2002. R. Anthony
4518 Reese, "The First Sale Doctrine in the Era of Digital Networks,"
4519 <em class=
"citetitle">Boston College Law Review
</em> 44 (
2003):
593 n.
51.
4520 </p></div></div></div><div class=
"chapter" title='Kapittel
11. Kapittel ti:
"Eiendom"'
><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h2 class=
"title"><a name=
"property-i"></a>Kapittel
11. Kapittel ti: "Eiendom"
</h2></div></div></div><div class=
"toc"><p><b>Innholdsfortegnelse
</b></p><dl><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#hollywood">Hvorfor Hollywood har rett
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#beginnings">Opphav
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#lawduration">Loven: Varighet
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#lawscope">Loven: Virkeområde
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#lawreach">Lov og arkitektur: Rekkevidde
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#lawforce">Arkitektur og lov: Makt
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#marketconcentration">Marked: Konsentrasjon
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#together">Sammen
</a></span></dt></dl></div><p>
4521 Jack Valenti has been the president of the Motion Picture Association of
4522 America since
1966. He first came to Washington, D.C., with Lyndon Johnson's
4523 administration
—literally. The famous picture of Johnson's swearing-in
4524 on Air Force One after the assassination of President Kennedy has Valenti in
4525 the background. In his almost forty years of running the MPAA, Valenti has
4526 established himself as perhaps the most prominent and effective lobbyist in
4527 Washington.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2591274"></a>
4529 The MPAA is the American branch of the international Motion Picture
4530 Association. It was formed in
1922 as a trade association whose goal was to
4531 defend American movies against increasing domestic criticism. The
4532 organization now represents not only filmmakers but producers and
4533 distributors of entertainment for television, video, and cable. Its board is
4534 made up of the chairmen and presidents of the seven major producers and
4535 distributors of motion picture and television programs in the United States:
4536 Walt Disney, Sony Pictures Entertainment, MGM, Paramount Pictures, Twentieth
4537 Century Fox, Universal Studios, and Warner Brothers.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2591332"></a> <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2591337"></a>
4538 <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2591343"></a> <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2591349"></a> <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2591356"></a> <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2591362"></a> <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2591368"></a>
4542 Valenti is only the third president of the MPAA. No president before him has
4543 had as much influence over that organization, or over Washington. As a
4544 Texan, Valenti has mastered the single most important political skill of a
4545 Southerner
—the ability to appear simple and slow while hiding a
4546 lightning-fast intellect. To this day, Valenti plays the simple, humble
4547 man. But this Harvard MBA, and author of four books, who finished high
4548 school at the age of fifteen and flew more than fifty combat missions in
4549 World War II, is no Mr. Smith. When Valenti went to Washington, he mastered
4550 the city in a quintessentially Washingtonian way.
4552 In defending artistic liberty and the freedom of speech that our culture
4553 depends upon, the MPAA has done important good. In crafting the MPAA rating
4554 system, it has probably avoided a great deal of speech-regulating harm. But
4555 there is an aspect to the organization's mission that is both the most
4556 radical and the most important. This is the organization's effort,
4557 epitomized in Valenti's every act, to redefine the meaning of "creative
4560 In
1982, Valenti's testimony to Congress captured the strategy perfectly:
4561 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
4562 No matter the lengthy arguments made, no matter the charges and the
4563 counter-charges, no matter the tumult and the shouting, reasonable men and
4564 women will keep returning to the fundamental issue, the central theme which
4565 animates this entire debate:
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>Creative property owners must be
4566 accorded the same rights and protection resident in all other property
4567 owners in the nation
</em></span>. That is the issue. That is the
4568 question. And that is the rostrum on which this entire hearing and the
4569 debates to follow must rest.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2591424" href=
"#ftn.id2591424" class=
"footnote">118</a>]
</sup>
4570 </p></blockquote></div><p>
4572 The strategy of this rhetoric, like the strategy of most of Valenti's
4573 rhetoric, is brilliant and simple and brilliant because simple. The "central
4574 theme" to which "reasonable men and women" will return is this: "Creative
4575 property owners must be accorded the same rights and protections resident in
4576 all other property owners in the nation." There are no second-class
4577 citizens, Valenti might have continued. There should be no second-class
4580 This claim has an obvious and powerful intuitive pull. It is stated with
4581 such clarity as to make the idea as obvious as the notion that we use
4582 elections to pick presidents. But in fact, there is no more extreme a claim
4583 made by
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>anyone
</em></span> who is serious in this debate than this
4584 claim of Valenti's. Jack Valenti, however sweet and however brilliant, is
4585 perhaps the nation's foremost extremist when it comes to the nature and
4586 scope of "creative property." His views have
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>no
</em></span>
4587 reasonable connection to our actual legal tradition, even if the subtle pull
4588 of his Texan charm has slowly redefined that tradition, at least in
4591 While "creative property" is certainly "property" in a nerdy and precise
4592 sense that lawyers are trained to understand,
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2591476" href=
"#ftn.id2591476" class=
"footnote">119</a>]
</sup> it has never been the case, nor should it be, that "creative
4593 property owners" have been "accorded the same rights and protection resident
4594 in all other property owners." Indeed, if creative property owners were
4595 given the same rights as all other property owners, that would effect a
4596 radical, and radically undesirable, change in our tradition.
4598 Valenti knows this. But he speaks for an industry that cares squat for our
4599 tradition and the values it represents. He speaks for an industry that is
4600 instead fighting to restore the tradition that the British overturned in
4601 1710. In the world that Valenti's changes would create, a powerful few would
4602 exercise powerful control over how our creative culture would develop.
4605 I have two purposes in this chapter. The first is to convince you that,
4606 historically, Valenti's claim is absolutely wrong. The second is to convince
4607 you that it would be terribly wrong for us to reject our history. We have
4608 always treated rights in creative property differently from the rights
4609 resident in all other property owners. They have never been the same. And
4610 they should never be the same, because, however counterintuitive this may
4611 seem, to make them the same would be to fundamentally weaken the opportunity
4612 for new creators to create. Creativity depends upon the owners of
4613 creativity having less than perfect control.
4615 Organizations such as the MPAA, whose board includes the most powerful of
4616 the old guard, have little interest, their rhetoric notwithstanding, in
4617 assuring that the new can displace them. No organization does. No person
4618 does. (Ask me about tenure, for example.) But what's good for the MPAA is
4619 not necessarily good for America. A society that defends the ideals of free
4620 culture must preserve precisely the opportunity for new creativity to
4621 threaten the old. To get just a hint that there is something fundamentally
4622 wrong in Valenti's argument, we need look no further than the United States
4623 Constitution itself.
4625 The framers of our Constitution loved "property." Indeed, so strongly did
4626 they love property that they built into the Constitution an important
4627 requirement. If the government takes your property
—if it condemns your
4628 house, or acquires a slice of land from your farm
—it is required,
4629 under the Fifth Amendment's "Takings Clause," to pay you "just compensation"
4630 for that taking. The Constitution thus guarantees that property is, in a
4631 certain sense, sacred. It cannot
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>ever
</em></span> be taken from the
4632 property owner unless the government pays for the privilege.
4635 Yet the very same Constitution speaks very differently about what Valenti
4636 calls "creative property." In the clause granting Congress the power to
4637 create "creative property," the Constitution
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>requires
</em></span>
4638 that after a "limited time," Congress take back the rights that it has
4639 granted and set the "creative property" free to the public domain. Yet when
4640 Congress does this, when the expiration of a copyright term "takes" your
4641 copyright and turns it over to the public domain, Congress does not have any
4642 obligation to pay "just compensation" for this "taking." Instead, the same
4643 Constitution that requires compensation for your land requires that you lose
4644 your "creative property" right without any compensation at all.
4646 The Constitution thus on its face states that these two forms of property
4647 are not to be accorded the same rights. They are plainly to be treated
4648 differently. Valenti is therefore not just asking for a change in our
4649 tradition when he argues that creative-property owners should be accorded
4650 the same rights as every other property-right owner. He is effectively
4651 arguing for a change in our Constitution itself.
4653 Arguing for a change in our Constitution is not necessarily wrong. There
4654 was much in our original Constitution that was plainly wrong. The
4655 Constitution of
1789 entrenched slavery; it left senators to be appointed
4656 rather than elected; it made it possible for the electoral college to
4657 produce a tie between the president and his own vice president (as it did in
4658 1800). The framers were no doubt extraordinary, but I would be the first to
4659 admit that they made big mistakes. We have since rejected some of those
4660 mistakes; no doubt there could be others that we should reject as well. So
4661 my argument is not simply that because Jefferson did it, we should, too.
4663 Instead, my argument is that because Jefferson did it, we should at least
4664 try to understand
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>why
</em></span>. Why did the framers, fanatical
4665 property types that they were, reject the claim that creative property be
4666 given the same rights as all other property? Why did they require that for
4667 creative property there must be a public domain?
4669 To answer this question, we need to get some perspective on the history of
4670 these "creative property" rights, and the control that they enabled. Once
4671 we see clearly how differently these rights have been defined, we will be in
4672 a better position to ask the question that should be at the core of this
4673 war: Not
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>whether
</em></span> creative property should be protected,
4674 but how. Not
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>whether
</em></span> we will enforce the rights the law
4675 gives to creative-property owners, but what the particular mix of rights
4676 ought to be. Not
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>whether
</em></span> artists should be paid, but
4677 whether institutions designed to assure that artists get paid need also
4678 control how culture develops.
4683 To answer these questions, we need a more general way to talk about how
4684 property is protected. More precisely, we need a more general way than the
4685 narrow language of the law allows. In
<em class=
"citetitle">Code and Other Laws of
4686 Cyberspace
</em>, I used a simple model to capture this more general
4687 perspective. For any particular right or regulation, this model asks how
4688 four different modalities of regulation interact to support or weaken the
4689 right or regulation. I represented it with this diagram:
4690 </p><div class=
"figure"><a name=
"fig-1331"></a><p class=
"title"><b>Figur
11.1. How four different modalities of regulation interact to support or weaken
4691 the right or regulation.
</b></p><div class=
"figure-contents"><div><img src=
"images/1331.png" alt=
"How four different modalities of regulation interact to support or weaken the right or regulation."></div></div></div><br class=
"figure-break"><p>
4692 At the center of this picture is a regulated dot: the individual or group
4693 that is the target of regulation, or the holder of a right. (In each case
4694 throughout, we can describe this either as regulation or as a right. For
4695 simplicity's sake, I will speak only of regulations.) The ovals represent
4696 four ways in which the individual or group might be regulated
— either
4697 constrained or, alternatively, enabled. Law is the most obvious constraint
4698 (to lawyers, at least). It constrains by threatening punishments after the
4699 fact if the rules set in advance are violated. So if, for example, you
4700 willfully infringe Madonna's copyright by copying a song from her latest CD
4701 and posting it on the Web, you can be punished with a $
150,
000 fine. The
4702 fine is an ex post punishment for violating an ex ante rule. It is imposed
4703 by the state.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2591383"></a>
4705 Norms are a different kind of constraint. They, too, punish an individual
4706 for violating a rule. But the punishment of a norm is imposed by a
4707 community, not (or not only) by the state. There may be no law against
4708 spitting, but that doesn't mean you won't be punished if you spit on the
4709 ground while standing in line at a movie. The punishment might not be harsh,
4710 though depending upon the community, it could easily be more harsh than many
4711 of the punishments imposed by the state. The mark of the difference is not
4712 the severity of the rule, but the source of the enforcement.
4714 The market is a third type of constraint. Its constraint is effected through
4715 conditions: You can do X if you pay Y; you'll be paid M if you do N. These
4716 constraints are obviously not independent of law or norms
—it is
4717 property law that defines what must be bought if it is to be taken legally;
4718 it is norms that say what is appropriately sold. But given a set of norms,
4719 and a background of property and contract law, the market imposes a
4720 simultaneous constraint upon how an individual or group might behave.
4722 Finally, and for the moment, perhaps, most mysteriously,
4723 "architecture"
—the physical world as one finds it
—is a
4724 constraint on behavior. A fallen bridge might constrain your ability to get
4725 across a river. Railroad tracks might constrain the ability of a community
4726 to integrate its social life. As with the market, architecture does not
4727 effect its constraint through ex post punishments. Instead, also as with the
4728 market, architecture effects its constraint through simultaneous
4729 conditions. These conditions are imposed not by courts enforcing contracts,
4730 or by police punishing theft, but by nature, by "architecture." If a
4731 500-pound boulder blocks your way, it is the law of gravity that enforces
4732 this constraint. If a $
500 airplane ticket stands between you and a flight
4733 to New York, it is the market that enforces this constraint.
4738 So the first point about these four modalities of regulation is obvious:
4739 They interact. Restrictions imposed by one might be reinforced by
4740 another. Or restrictions imposed by one might be undermined by another.
4742 The second point follows directly: If we want to understand the effective
4743 freedom that anyone has at a given moment to do any particular thing, we
4744 have to consider how these four modalities interact. Whether or not there
4745 are other constraints (there may well be; my claim is not about
4746 comprehensiveness), these four are among the most significant, and any
4747 regulator (whether controlling or freeing) must consider how these four in
4748 particular interact.
4749 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"idxdrivespeed"></a><p>
4750 So, for example, consider the "freedom" to drive a car at a high speed. That
4751 freedom is in part restricted by laws: speed limits that say how fast you
4752 can drive in particular places at particular times. It is in part restricted
4753 by architecture: speed bumps, for example, slow most rational drivers;
4754 governors in buses, as another example, set the maximum rate at which the
4755 driver can drive. The freedom is in part restricted by the market: Fuel
4756 efficiency drops as speed increases, thus the price of gasoline indirectly
4757 constrains speed. And finally, the norms of a community may or may not
4758 constrain the freedom to speed. Drive at
50 mph by a school in your own
4759 neighborhood and you're likely to be punished by the neighbors. The same
4760 norm wouldn't be as effective in a different town, or at night.
4763 The final point about this simple model should also be fairly clear: While
4764 these four modalities are analytically independent, law has a special role
4765 in affecting the three.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2591803" href=
"#ftn.id2591803" class=
"footnote">120</a>]
</sup> The law, in
4766 other words, sometimes operates to increase or decrease the constraint of a
4767 particular modality. Thus, the law might be used to increase taxes on
4768 gasoline, so as to increase the incentives to drive more slowly. The law
4769 might be used to mandate more speed bumps, so as to increase the difficulty
4770 of driving rapidly. The law might be used to fund ads that stigmatize
4771 reckless driving. Or the law might be used to require that other laws be
4772 more strict
—a federal requirement that states decrease the speed
4773 limit, for example
—so as to decrease the attractiveness of fast
4775 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2591824"></a><div class=
"figure"><a name=
"fig-1361"></a><p class=
"title"><b>Figur
11.2. Law has a special role in affecting the three.
</b></p><div class=
"figure-contents"><div><img src=
"images/1361.png" alt=
"Law has a special role in affecting the three."></div></div></div><br class=
"figure-break"><p>
4776 These constraints can thus change, and they can be changed. To understand
4777 the effective protection of liberty or protection of property at any
4778 particular moment, we must track these changes over time. A restriction
4779 imposed by one modality might be erased by another. A freedom enabled by one
4780 modality might be displaced by another.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2591868" href=
"#ftn.id2591868" class=
"footnote">121</a>]
</sup>
4781 </p><div class=
"section" title=
"Hvorfor Hollywood har rett"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h2 class=
"title" style=
"clear: both"><a name=
"hollywood"></a>Hvorfor Hollywood har rett
</h2></div></div></div><p>
4782 The most obvious point that this model reveals is just why, or just how,
4783 Hollywood is right. The copyright warriors have rallied Congress and the
4784 courts to defend copyright. This model helps us see why that rallying makes
4787 Let's say this is the picture of copyright's regulation before the Internet:
4788 </p><div class=
"figure"><a name=
"fig-1371"></a><p class=
"title"><b>Figur
11.3. Copyright's regulation before the Internet.
</b></p><div class=
"figure-contents"><div><img src=
"images/1331.png" alt=
"Copyright's regulation before the Internet."></div></div></div><br class=
"figure-break"><p>
4791 There is balance between law, norms, market, and architecture. The law
4792 limits the ability to copy and share content, by imposing penalties on those
4793 who copy and share content. Those penalties are reinforced by technologies
4794 that make it hard to copy and share content (architecture) and expensive to
4795 copy and share content (market). Finally, those penalties are mitigated by
4796 norms we all recognize
—kids, for example, taping other kids'
4797 records. These uses of copyrighted material may well be infringement, but
4798 the norms of our society (before the Internet, at least) had no problem with
4799 this form of infringement.
4801 Enter the Internet, or, more precisely, technologies such as MP3s and p2p
4802 sharing. Now the constraint of architecture changes dramatically, as does
4803 the constraint of the market. And as both the market and architecture relax
4804 the regulation of copyright, norms pile on. The happy balance (for the
4805 warriors, at least) of life before the Internet becomes an effective state
4806 of anarchy after the Internet.
4809 Thus the sense of, and justification for, the warriors' response.
4810 Technology has changed, the warriors say, and the effect of this change,
4811 when ramified through the market and norms, is that a balance of protection
4812 for the copyright owners' rights has been lost. This is Iraq after the fall
4813 of Saddam, but this time no government is justifying the looting that
4815 </p><div class=
"figure"><a name=
"fig-1381"></a><p class=
"title"><b>Figur
11.4. effective state of anarchy after the Internet.
</b></p><div class=
"figure-contents"><div><img src=
"images/1381.png" alt=
"effective state of anarchy after the Internet."></div></div></div><br class=
"figure-break"><p>
4816 Neither this analysis nor the conclusions that follow are new to the
4817 warriors. Indeed, in a "White Paper" prepared by the Commerce Department
4818 (one heavily influenced by the copyright warriors) in
1995, this mix of
4819 regulatory modalities had already been identified and the strategy to
4820 respond already mapped. In response to the changes the Internet had
4821 effected, the White Paper argued (
1) Congress should strengthen intellectual
4822 property law, (
2) businesses should adopt innovative marketing techniques,
4823 (
3) technologists should push to develop code to protect copyrighted
4824 material, and (
4) educators should educate kids to better protect copyright.
4827 This mixed strategy is just what copyright needed
—if it was to
4828 preserve the particular balance that existed before the change induced by
4829 the Internet. And it's just what we should expect the content industry to
4830 push for. It is as American as apple pie to consider the happy life you have
4831 as an entitlement, and to look to the law to protect it if something comes
4832 along to change that happy life. Homeowners living in a flood plain have no
4833 hesitation appealing to the government to rebuild (and rebuild again) when a
4834 flood (architecture) wipes away their property (law). Farmers have no
4835 hesitation appealing to the government to bail them out when a virus
4836 (architecture) devastates their crop. Unions have no hesitation appealing to
4837 the government to bail them out when imports (market) wipe out the
4838 U.S. steel industry.
4840 Thus, there's nothing wrong or surprising in the content industry's campaign
4841 to protect itself from the harmful consequences of a technological
4842 innovation. And I would be the last person to argue that the changing
4843 technology of the Internet has not had a profound effect on the content
4844 industry's way of doing business, or as John Seely Brown describes it, its
4845 "architecture of revenue."
4847 But just because a particular interest asks for government support, it
4848 doesn't follow that support should be granted. And just because technology
4849 has weakened a particular way of doing business, it doesn't follow that the
4850 government should intervene to support that old way of doing
4851 business. Kodak, for example, has lost perhaps as much as
20 percent of
4852 their traditional film market to the emerging technologies of digital
4853 cameras.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2592065" href=
"#ftn.id2592065" class=
"footnote">122</a>]
</sup> Does anyone believe the
4854 government should ban digital cameras just to support Kodak? Highways have
4855 weakened the freight business for railroads. Does anyone think we should ban
4856 trucks from roads
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>for the purpose of
</em></span> protecting the
4857 railroads? Closer to the subject of this book, remote channel changers have
4858 weakened the "stickiness" of television advertising (if a boring commercial
4859 comes on the TV, the remote makes it easy to surf ), and it may well be that
4860 this change has weakened the television advertising market. But does anyone
4861 believe we should regulate remotes to reinforce commercial television?
4862 (Maybe by limiting them to function only once a second, or to switch to only
4863 ten channels within an hour?)
4865 The obvious answer to these obviously rhetorical questions is no. In a free
4866 society, with a free market, supported by free enterprise and free trade,
4867 the government's role is not to support one way of doing business against
4868 others. Its role is not to pick winners and protect them against loss. If
4869 the government did this generally, then we would never have any progress. As
4870 Microsoft chairman Bill Gates wrote in
1991, in a memo criticizing software
4871 patents, "established companies have an interest in excluding future
4872 competitors."
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2592115" href=
"#ftn.id2592115" class=
"footnote">123</a>]
</sup> And relative to a
4873 startup, established companies also have the means. (Think RCA and FM
4874 radio.) A world in which competitors with new ideas must fight not only the
4875 market but also the government is a world in which competitors with new
4876 ideas will not succeed. It is a world of stasis and increasingly
4877 concentrated stagnation. It is the Soviet Union under Brezhnev.
4878 <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2592134"></a>
4880 Thus, while it is understandable for industries threatened with new
4881 technologies that change the way they do business to look to the government
4882 for protection, it is the special duty of policy makers to guarantee that
4883 that protection not become a deterrent to progress. It is the duty of policy
4884 makers, in other words, to assure that the changes they create, in response
4885 to the request of those hurt by changing technology, are changes that
4886 preserve the incentives and opportunities for innovation and change.
4888 In the context of laws regulating speech
—which include, obviously,
4889 copyright law
—that duty is even stronger. When the industry
4890 complaining about changing technologies is asking Congress to respond in a
4891 way that burdens speech and creativity, policy makers should be especially
4892 wary of the request. It is always a bad deal for the government to get into
4893 the business of regulating speech markets. The risks and dangers of that
4894 game are precisely why our framers created the First Amendment to our
4895 Constitution: "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of
4896 speech." So when Congress is being asked to pass laws that would "abridge"
4897 the freedom of speech, it should ask
— carefully
—whether such
4898 regulation is justified.
4901 My argument just now, however, has nothing to do with whether the changes
4902 that are being pushed by the copyright warriors are "justified." My argument
4903 is about their effect. For before we get to the question of justification, a
4904 hard question that depends a great deal upon your values, we should first
4905 ask whether we understand the effect of the changes the content industry
4908 Her kommer metaforen som vil forklare argumentet.
4909 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"idxddt"></a><p>
4910 In
1873, the chemical DDT was first synthesized. In
1948, Swiss chemist Paul
4911 Hermann Müller won the Nobel Prize for his work demonstrating the
4912 insecticidal properties of DDT. By the
1950s, the insecticide was widely
4913 used around the world to kill disease-carrying pests. It was also used to
4914 increase farm production.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2592211"></a>
4916 No one doubts that killing disease-carrying pests or increasing crop
4917 production is a good thing. No one doubts that the work of Müller was
4918 important and valuable and probably saved lives, possibly millions.
4919 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2592229"></a><p>
4920 But in
1962, Rachel Carson published
<em class=
"citetitle">Silent Spring
</em>,
4921 which argued that DDT, whatever its primary benefits, was also having
4922 unintended environmental consequences. Birds were losing the ability to
4923 reproduce. Whole chains of the ecology were being destroyed.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2592245"></a> <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2592251"></a>
4925 No one set out to destroy the environment. Paul Müller certainly did not aim
4926 to harm any birds. But the effort to solve one set of problems produced
4927 another set which, in the view of some, was far worse than the problems that
4928 were originally attacked. Or more accurately, the problems DDT caused were
4929 worse than the problems it solved, at least when considering the other, more
4930 environmentally friendly ways to solve the problems that DDT was meant to
4934 It is to this image precisely that Duke University law professor James Boyle
4935 appeals when he argues that we need an "environmentalism" for
4936 culture.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2592281" href=
"#ftn.id2592281" class=
"footnote">124</a>]
</sup> His point, and the point I
4937 want to develop in the balance of this chapter, is not that the aims of
4938 copyright are flawed. Or that authors should not be paid for their work. Or
4939 that music should be given away "for free." The point is that some of the
4940 ways in which we might protect authors will have unintended consequences for
4941 the cultural environment, much like DDT had for the natural environment. And
4942 just as criticism of DDT is not an endorsement of malaria or an attack on
4943 farmers, so, too, is criticism of one particular set of regulations
4944 protecting copyright not an endorsement of anarchy or an attack on authors.
4945 It is an environment of creativity that we seek, and we should be aware of
4946 our actions' effects on the environment.
4948 My argument, in the balance of this chapter, tries to map exactly this
4949 effect. No doubt the technology of the Internet has had a dramatic effect on
4950 the ability of copyright owners to protect their content. But there should
4951 also be little doubt that when you add together the changes in copyright law
4952 over time, plus the change in technology that the Internet is undergoing
4953 just now, the net effect of these changes will not be only that copyrighted
4954 work is effectively protected. Also, and generally missed, the net effect of
4955 this massive increase in protection will be devastating to the environment
4958 In a line: To kill a gnat, we are spraying DDT with consequences for free
4959 culture that will be far more devastating than that this gnat will be lost.
4960 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2592325"></a></div><div class=
"section" title=
"Opphav"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h2 class=
"title" style=
"clear: both"><a name=
"beginnings"></a>Opphav
</h2></div></div></div><p>
4961 America copied English copyright law. Actually, we copied and improved
4962 English copyright law. Our Constitution makes the purpose of "creative
4963 property" rights clear; its express limitations reinforce the English aim to
4964 avoid overly powerful publishers.
4966 The power to establish "creative property" rights is granted to Congress in
4967 a way that, for our Constitution, at least, is very odd. Article I, section
4968 8, clause
8 of our Constitution states that:
4971 Congress has the power to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts,
4972 by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right
4973 to their respective Writings and Discoveries. We can call this the
4974 "Progress Clause," for notice what this clause does not say. It does not say
4975 Congress has the power to grant "creative property rights." It says that
4976 Congress has the power
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>to promote progress
</em></span>. The grant
4977 of power is its purpose, and its purpose is a public one, not the purpose of
4978 enriching publishers, nor even primarily the purpose of rewarding authors.
4980 The Progress Clause expressly limits the term of copyrights. As we saw in
4981 chapter
6, the English limited the term of copyright so as to assure that a
4982 few would not exercise disproportionate control over culture by exercising
4983 disproportionate control over publishing. We can assume the framers followed
4984 the English for a similar purpose. Indeed, unlike the English, the framers
4985 reinforced that objective, by requiring that copyrights extend "to Authors"
4988 The design of the Progress Clause reflects something about the
4989 Constitution's design in general. To avoid a problem, the framers built
4990 structure. To prevent the concentrated power of publishers, they built a
4991 structure that kept copyrights away from publishers and kept them short. To
4992 prevent the concentrated power of a church, they banned the federal
4993 government from establishing a church. To prevent concentrating power in the
4994 federal government, they built structures to reinforce the power of the
4995 states
—including the Senate, whose members were at the time selected
4996 by the states, and an electoral college, also selected by the states, to
4997 select the president. In each case, a
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>structure
</em></span> built
4998 checks and balances into the constitutional frame, structured to prevent
4999 otherwise inevitable concentrations of power.
5001 I doubt the framers would recognize the regulation we call "copyright"
5002 today. The scope of that regulation is far beyond anything they ever
5003 considered. To begin to understand what they did, we need to put our
5004 "copyright" in context: We need to see how it has changed in the
210 years
5005 since they first struck its design.
5008 Some of these changes come from the law: some in light of changes in
5009 technology, and some in light of changes in technology given a particular
5010 concentration of market power. In terms of our model, we started here:
5011 </p><div class=
"figure"><a name=
"fig-1441"></a><p class=
"title"><b>Figur
11.5. Copyright's regulation before the Internet.
</b></p><div class=
"figure-contents"><div><img src=
"images/1331.png" alt=
"Copyright's regulation before the Internet."></div></div></div><br class=
"figure-break"><p>
5012 Vi kommer til å ende opp her:
5013 </p><div class=
"figure"><a name=
"fig-1442"></a><p class=
"title"><b>Figur
11.6. "Opphavsrett" i dag.
</b></p><div class=
"figure-contents"><div><img src=
"images/1442.png" alt='
"Opphavsrett" i dag.'
></div></div></div><br class=
"figure-break"><p>
5015 La meg forklare hvordan.
5017 </p></div><div class=
"section" title=
"Loven: Varighet"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h2 class=
"title" style=
"clear: both"><a name=
"lawduration"></a>Loven: Varighet
</h2></div></div></div><p>
5018 When the first Congress enacted laws to protect creative property, it faced
5019 the same uncertainty about the status of creative property that the English
5020 had confronted in
1774. Many states had passed laws protecting creative
5021 property, and some believed that these laws simply supplemented common law
5022 rights that already protected creative authorship.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2592477" href=
"#ftn.id2592477" class=
"footnote">125</a>]
</sup> This meant that there was no guaranteed public
5023 domain in the United States in
1790. If copyrights were protected by the
5024 common law, then there was no simple way to know whether a work published in
5025 the United States was controlled or free. Just as in England, this lingering
5026 uncertainty would make it hard for publishers to rely upon a public domain
5027 to reprint and distribute works.
5029 That uncertainty ended after Congress passed legislation granting
5030 copyrights. Because federal law overrides any contrary state law, federal
5031 protections for copyrighted works displaced any state law protections. Just
5032 as in England the Statute of Anne eventually meant that the copyrights for
5033 all English works expired, a federal statute meant that any state copyrights
5036 In
1790, Congress enacted the first copyright law. It created a federal
5037 copyright and secured that copyright for fourteen years. If the author was
5038 alive at the end of that fourteen years, then he could opt to renew the
5039 copyright for another fourteen years. If he did not renew the copyright, his
5040 work passed into the public domain.
5042 Selv om det ble skapt mange verker i USA i de første
10 årene til
5043 republikken, så ble kun
5 prosent av verkene registrert under det føderale
5044 opphavsrettsregimet. Av alle verker skapt i USA både før
1790 og fra
1790
5045 fram til
1800, så ble
95 prosent øyeblikkelig allemannseie (public
5046 domain). Resten ble allemannseie etter maksimalt
20 år, og som oftest etter
5047 14 år.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2592543" href=
"#ftn.id2592543" class=
"footnote">126</a>]
</sup>
5050 Dette fornyelsessystemet var en avgjørende del av det amerikanske systemet
5051 for opphavsrett. Det sikret at maksimal vernetid i opphavsretten bare ble
5052 gitt til verker der det var ønsket. Etter den første perioden på fjorten år,
5053 hvis forfatteren ikke så verdien av å fornye sin opphavsrett, var det heller
5054 ikke verdt det for samfunnet å håndheve opphavsretten.
5056 Fourteen years may not seem long to us, but for the vast majority of
5057 copyright owners at that time, it was long enough: Only a small minority of
5058 them renewed their copyright after fourteen years; the balance allowed their
5059 work to pass into the public domain.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2592609" href=
"#ftn.id2592609" class=
"footnote">127</a>]
</sup>
5061 Even today, this structure would make sense. Most creative work has an
5062 actual commercial life of just a couple of years. Most books fall out of
5063 print after one year.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2592638" href=
"#ftn.id2592638" class=
"footnote">128</a>]
</sup> When that
5064 happens, the used books are traded free of copyright regulation. Thus the
5065 books are no longer
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>effectively
</em></span> controlled by
5066 copyright. The only practical commercial use of the books at that time is to
5067 sell the books as used books; that use
—because it does not involve
5068 publication
—is effectively free.
5070 In the first hundred years of the Republic, the term of copyright was
5071 changed once. In
1831, the term was increased from a maximum of
28 years to
5072 a maximum of
42 by increasing the initial term of copyright from
14 years to
5073 28 years. In the next fifty years of the Republic, the term increased once
5074 again. In
1909, Congress extended the renewal term of
14 years to
28 years,
5075 setting a maximum term of
56 years.
5077 Then, beginning in
1962, Congress started a practice that has defined
5078 copyright law since. Eleven times in the last forty years, Congress has
5079 extended the terms of existing copyrights; twice in those forty years,
5080 Congress extended the term of future copyrights. Initially, the extensions
5081 of existing copyrights were short, a mere one to two years. In
1976,
5082 Congress extended all existing copyrights by nineteen years. And in
1998,
5083 in the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, Congress extended the term
5084 of existing and future copyrights by twenty years.
5087 The effect of these extensions is simply to toll, or delay, the passing of
5088 works into the public domain. This latest extension means that the public
5089 domain will have been tolled for thirty-nine out of fifty-five years, or
70
5090 percent of the time since
1962. Thus, in the twenty years after the Sonny
5091 Bono Act, while one million patents will pass into the public domain, zero
5092 copyrights will pass into the public domain by virtue of the expiration of a
5095 The effect of these extensions has been exacerbated by another,
5096 little-noticed change in the copyright law. Remember I said that the framers
5097 established a two-part copyright regime, requiring a copyright owner to
5098 renew his copyright after an initial term. The requirement of renewal meant
5099 that works that no longer needed copyright protection would pass more
5100 quickly into the public domain. The works remaining under protection would
5101 be those that had some continuing commercial value.
5103 The United States abandoned this sensible system in
1976. For all works
5104 created after
1978, there was only one copyright term
—the maximum
5105 term. For "natural" authors, that term was life plus fifty years. For
5106 corporations, the term was seventy-five years. Then, in
1992, Congress
5107 abandoned the renewal requirement for all works created before
1978. All
5108 works still under copyright would be accorded the maximum term then
5109 available. After the Sonny Bono Act, that term was ninety-five years.
5111 This change meant that American law no longer had an automatic way to assure
5112 that works that were no longer exploited passed into the public domain. And
5113 indeed, after these changes, it is unclear whether it is even possible to
5114 put works into the public domain. The public domain is orphaned by these
5115 changes in copyright law. Despite the requirement that terms be "limited,"
5116 we have no evidence that anything will limit them.
5118 The effect of these changes on the average duration of copyright is
5119 dramatic. In
1973, more than
85 percent of copyright owners failed to renew
5120 their copyright. That meant that the average term of copyright in
1973 was
5121 just
32.2 years. Because of the elimination of the renewal requirement, the
5122 average term of copyright is now the maximum term. In thirty years, then,
5123 the average term has tripled, from
32.2 years to
95 years.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2592733" href=
"#ftn.id2592733" class=
"footnote">129</a>]
</sup>
5124 </p></div><div class=
"section" title=
"Loven: Virkeområde"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h2 class=
"title" style=
"clear: both"><a name=
"lawscope"></a>Loven: Virkeområde
</h2></div></div></div><p>
5125 The "scope" of a copyright is the range of rights granted by the law. The
5126 scope of American copyright has changed dramatically. Those changes are not
5127 necessarily bad. But we should understand the extent of the changes if we're
5128 to keep this debate in context.
5130 In
1790, that scope was very narrow. Copyright covered only "maps, charts,
5131 and books." That means it didn't cover, for example, music or
5132 architecture. More significantly, the right granted by a copyright gave the
5133 author the exclusive right to "publish" copyrighted works. That means
5134 someone else violated the copyright only if he republished the work without
5135 the copyright owner's permission. Finally, the right granted by a copyright
5136 was an exclusive right to that particular book. The right did not extend to
5137 what lawyers call "derivative works." It would not, therefore, interfere
5138 with the right of someone other than the author to translate a copyrighted
5139 book, or to adapt the story to a different form (such as a drama based on a
5142 This, too, has changed dramatically. While the contours of copyright today
5143 are extremely hard to describe simply, in general terms, the right covers
5144 practically any creative work that is reduced to a tangible form. It covers
5145 music as well as architecture, drama as well as computer programs. It gives
5146 the copyright owner of that creative work not only the exclusive right to
5147 "publish" the work, but also the exclusive right of control over any
5148 "copies" of that work. And most significant for our purposes here, the right
5149 gives the copyright owner control over not only his or her particular work,
5150 but also any "derivative work" that might grow out of the original work. In
5151 this way, the right covers more creative work, protects the creative work
5152 more broadly, and protects works that are based in a significant way on the
5153 initial creative work.
5156 At the same time that the scope of copyright has expanded, procedural
5157 limitations on the right have been relaxed. I've already described the
5158 complete removal of the renewal requirement in
1992. In addition to the
5159 renewal requirement, for most of the history of American copyright law,
5160 there was a requirement that a work be registered before it could receive
5161 the protection of a copyright. There was also a requirement that any
5162 copyrighted work be marked either with that famous © or the word
5163 <span class=
"emphasis"><em>copyright
</em></span>. And for most of the history of American
5164 copyright law, there was a requirement that works be deposited with the
5165 government before a copyright could be secured.
5167 The reason for the registration requirement was the sensible understanding
5168 that for most works, no copyright was required. Again, in the first ten
5169 years of the Republic,
95 percent of works eligible for copyright were never
5170 copyrighted. Thus, the rule reflected the norm: Most works apparently didn't
5171 need copyright, so registration narrowed the regulation of the law to the
5172 few that did. The same reasoning justified the requirement that a work be
5173 marked as copyrighted
—that way it was easy to know whether a copyright
5174 was being claimed. The requirement that works be deposited was to assure
5175 that after the copyright expired, there would be a copy of the work
5176 somewhere so that it could be copied by others without locating the original
5179 All of these "formalities" were abolished in the American system when we
5180 decided to follow European copyright law. There is no requirement that you
5181 register a work to get a copyright; the copyright now is automatic; the
5182 copyright exists whether or not you mark your work with a ©; and the
5183 copyright exists whether or not you actually make a copy available for
5186 Vurder et praktisk eksempel for å forstå omfanget av disse forskjellene.
5188 If, in
1790, you wrote a book and you were one of the
5 percent who actually
5189 copyrighted that book, then the copyright law protected you against another
5190 publisher's taking your book and republishing it without your
5191 permission. The aim of the act was to regulate publishers so as to prevent
5192 that kind of unfair competition. In
1790, there were
174 publishers in the
5193 United States.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2592857" href=
"#ftn.id2592857" class=
"footnote">130</a>]
</sup> The Copyright Act was
5194 thus a tiny regulation of a tiny proportion of a tiny part of the creative
5195 market in the United States
—publishers.
5199 The act left other creators totally unregulated. If I copied your poem by
5200 hand, over and over again, as a way to learn it by heart, my act was totally
5201 unregulated by the
1790 act. If I took your novel and made a play based upon
5202 it, or if I translated it or abridged it, none of those activities were
5203 regulated by the original copyright act. These creative activities remained
5204 free, while the activities of publishers were restrained.
5206 Today the story is very different: If you write a book, your book is
5207 automatically protected. Indeed, not just your book. Every e-mail, every
5208 note to your spouse, every doodle,
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>every
</em></span> creative act
5209 that's reduced to a tangible form
—all of this is automatically
5210 copyrighted. There is no need to register or mark your work. The protection
5211 follows the creation, not the steps you take to protect it.
5213 That protection gives you the right (subject to a narrow range of fair use
5214 exceptions) to control how others copy the work, whether they copy it to
5215 republish it or to share an excerpt.
5217 That much is the obvious part. Any system of copyright would control
5218 competing publishing. But there's a second part to the copyright of today
5219 that is not at all obvious. This is the protection of "derivative rights."
5220 If you write a book, no one can make a movie out of your book without
5221 permission. No one can translate it without permission. CliffsNotes can't
5222 make an abridgment unless permission is granted. All of these derivative
5223 uses of your original work are controlled by the copyright holder. The
5224 copyright, in other words, is now not just an exclusive right to your
5225 writings, but an exclusive right to your writings and a large proportion of
5226 the writings inspired by them.
5228 It is this derivative right that would seem most bizarre to our framers,
5229 though it has become second nature to us. Initially, this expansion was
5230 created to deal with obvious evasions of a narrower copyright. If I write a
5231 book, can you change one word and then claim a copyright in a new and
5232 different book? Obviously that would make a joke of the copyright, so the
5233 law was properly expanded to include those slight modifications as well as
5234 the verbatim original work.
5237 In preventing that joke, the law created an astonishing power within a free
5238 culture
—at least, it's astonishing when you understand that the law
5239 applies not just to the commercial publisher but to anyone with a
5240 computer. I understand the wrong in duplicating and selling someone else's
5241 work. But whatever
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>that
</em></span> wrong is, transforming someone
5242 else's work is a different wrong. Some view transformation as no wrong at
5243 all
—they believe that our law, as the framers penned it, should not
5244 protect derivative rights at all.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2592938" href=
"#ftn.id2592938" class=
"footnote">131</a>]
</sup>
5245 Whether or not you go that far, it seems plain that whatever wrong is
5246 involved is fundamentally different from the wrong of direct piracy.
5248 Yet copyright law treats these two different wrongs in the same way. I can
5249 go to court and get an injunction against your pirating my book. I can go to
5250 court and get an injunction against your transformative use of my
5251 book.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2592985" href=
"#ftn.id2592985" class=
"footnote">132</a>]
</sup> These two different uses of my
5252 creative work are treated the same.
5254 This again may seem right to you. If I wrote a book, then why should you be
5255 able to write a movie that takes my story and makes money from it without
5256 paying me or crediting me? Or if Disney creates a creature called "Mickey
5257 Mouse," why should you be able to make Mickey Mouse toys and be the one to
5258 trade on the value that Disney originally created?
5260 These are good arguments, and, in general, my point is not that the
5261 derivative right is unjustified. My aim just now is much narrower: simply to
5262 make clear that this expansion is a significant change from the rights
5264 </p></div><div class=
"section" title=
"Lov og arkitektur: Rekkevidde"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h2 class=
"title" style=
"clear: both"><a name=
"lawreach"></a>Lov og arkitektur: Rekkevidde
</h2></div></div></div><p>
5265 Whereas originally the law regulated only publishers, the change in
5266 copyright's scope means that the law today regulates publishers, users, and
5267 authors. It regulates them because all three are capable of making copies,
5268 and the core of the regulation of copyright law is copies.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2593035" href=
"#ftn.id2593035" class=
"footnote">133</a>]
</sup>
5272 "Copies." That certainly sounds like the obvious thing for
5273 <span class=
"emphasis"><em>copy
</em></span>right law to regulate. But as with Jack Valenti's
5274 argument at the start of this chapter, that "creative property" deserves the
5275 "same rights" as all other property, it is the
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>obvious
</em></span>
5276 that we need to be most careful about. For while it may be obvious that in
5277 the world before the Internet, copies were the obvious trigger for copyright
5278 law, upon reflection, it should be obvious that in the world with the
5279 Internet, copies should
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>not
</em></span> be the trigger for
5280 copyright law. More precisely, they should not
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>always
</em></span>
5281 be the trigger for copyright law.
5283 This is perhaps the central claim of this book, so let me take this very
5284 slowly so that the point is not easily missed. My claim is that the Internet
5285 should at least force us to rethink the conditions under which the law of
5286 copyright automatically applies,
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2593096" href=
"#ftn.id2593096" class=
"footnote">134</a>]
</sup>
5287 because it is clear that the current reach of copyright was never
5288 contemplated, much less chosen, by the legislators who enacted copyright
5291 We can see this point abstractly by beginning with this largely empty
5293 </p><div class=
"figure"><a name=
"fig-1521"></a><p class=
"title"><b>Figur
11.7. Alle potensielle bruk av en bok.
</b></p><div class=
"figure-contents"><div><img src=
"images/1521.png" alt=
"Alle potensielle bruk av en bok."></div></div></div><br class=
"figure-break"><p>
5296 Think about a book in real space, and imagine this circle to represent all
5297 its potential
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>uses
</em></span>. Most of these uses are unregulated
5298 by copyright law, because the uses don't create a copy. If you read a book,
5299 that act is not regulated by copyright law. If you give someone the book,
5300 that act is not regulated by copyright law. If you resell a book, that act
5301 is not regulated (copyright law expressly states that after the first sale
5302 of a book, the copyright owner can impose no further conditions on the
5303 disposition of the book). If you sleep on the book or use it to hold up a
5304 lamp or let your puppy chew it up, those acts are not regulated by copyright
5305 law, because those acts do not make a copy.
5306 </p><div class=
"figure"><a name=
"fig-1531"></a><p class=
"title"><b>Figur
11.8. Eksempler på uregulert bruk av en bok.
</b></p><div class=
"figure-contents"><div><img src=
"images/1531.png" alt=
"Eksempler på uregulert bruk av en bok."></div></div></div><br class=
"figure-break"><p>
5307 Obviously, however, some uses of a copyrighted book are regulated by
5308 copyright law. Republishing the book, for example, makes a copy. It is
5309 therefore regulated by copyright law. Indeed, this particular use stands at
5310 the core of this circle of possible uses of a copyrighted work. It is the
5311 paradigmatic use properly regulated by copyright regulation (see first
5312 diagram on next page).
5314 Til slutt er det en tynn skive av ellers regulert kopierings-bruk som
5315 forblir uregluert på grunn av at loven anser dette som "rimelig bruk".
5316 </p><div class=
"figure"><a name=
"fig-1541"></a><p class=
"title"><b>Figur
11.9. Republishing stands at the core of this circle of possible uses of a
5317 copyrighted work.
</b></p><div class=
"figure-contents"><div><img src=
"images/1541.png" alt=
"Republishing stands at the core of this circle of possible uses of a copyrighted work."></div></div></div><br class=
"figure-break"><p>
5318 These are uses that themselves involve copying, but which the law treats as
5319 unregulated because public policy demands that they remain unregulated. You
5320 are free to quote from this book, even in a review that is quite negative,
5321 without my permission, even though that quoting makes a copy. That copy
5322 would ordinarily give the copyright owner the exclusive right to say whether
5323 the copy is allowed or not, but the law denies the owner any exclusive right
5324 over such "fair uses" for public policy (and possibly First Amendment)
5326 </p><div class=
"figure"><a name=
"fig-1542"></a><p class=
"title"><b>Figur
11.10. Uregulert kopiering anses som "rimelig bruk".
</b></p><div class=
"figure-contents"><div><img src=
"images/1542.png" alt='Uregulert kopiering anses som
"rimelig bruk".'
></div></div></div><br class=
"figure-break"><p> </p><div class=
"figure"><a name=
"fig-1551"></a><p class=
"title"><b>Figur
11.11. Uses that before were presumptively unregulated are now presumptively
5327 regulated.
</b></p><div class=
"figure-contents"><div><img src=
"images/1551.png" alt=
"Uses that before were presumptively unregulated are now presumptively regulated."></div></div></div><br class=
"figure-break"><p>
5330 In real space, then, the possible uses of a book are divided into three
5331 sorts: (
1) unregulated uses, (
2) regulated uses, and (
3) regulated uses that
5332 are nonetheless deemed "fair" regardless of the copyright owner's views.
5334 Enter the Internet
—a distributed, digital network where every use of a
5335 copyrighted work produces a copy.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2593042" href=
"#ftn.id2593042" class=
"footnote">135</a>]
</sup> And
5336 because of this single, arbitrary feature of the design of a digital
5337 network, the scope of category
1 changes dramatically. Uses that before were
5338 presumptively unregulated are now presumptively regulated. No longer is
5339 there a set of presumptively unregulated uses that define a freedom
5340 associated with a copyrighted work. Instead, each use is now subject to the
5341 copyright, because each use also makes a copy
—category
1 gets sucked
5342 into category
2. And those who would defend the unregulated uses of
5343 copyrighted work must look exclusively to category
3, fair uses, to bear the
5344 burden of this shift.
5347 So let's be very specific to make this general point clear. Before the
5348 Internet, if you purchased a book and read it ten times, there would be no
5349 plausible
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>copyright
</em></span>-related argument that the copyright
5350 owner could make to control that use of her book. Copyright law would have
5351 nothing to say about whether you read the book once, ten times, or every
5352 night before you went to bed. None of those instances of
5353 use
—reading
— could be regulated by copyright law because none of
5354 those uses produced a copy.
5356 But the same book as an e-book is effectively governed by a different set of
5357 rules. Now if the copyright owner says you may read the book only once or
5358 only once a month, then
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>copyright law
</em></span> would aid the
5359 copyright owner in exercising this degree of control, because of the
5360 accidental feature of copyright law that triggers its application upon there
5361 being a copy. Now if you read the book ten times and the license says you
5362 may read it only five times, then whenever you read the book (or any portion
5363 of it) beyond the fifth time, you are making a copy of the book contrary to
5364 the copyright owner's wish.
5366 There are some people who think this makes perfect sense. My aim just now is
5367 not to argue about whether it makes sense or not. My aim is only to make
5368 clear the change. Once you see this point, a few other points also become
5371 First, making category
1 disappear is not anything any policy maker ever
5372 intended. Congress did not think through the collapse of the presumptively
5373 unregulated uses of copyrighted works. There is no evidence at all that
5374 policy makers had this idea in mind when they allowed our policy here to
5375 shift. Unregulated uses were an important part of free culture before the
5378 Second, this shift is especially troubling in the context of transformative
5379 uses of creative content. Again, we can all understand the wrong in
5380 commercial piracy. But the law now purports to regulate
5381 <span class=
"emphasis"><em>any
</em></span> transformation you make of creative work using a
5382 machine. "Copy and paste" and "cut and paste" become crimes. Tinkering with
5383 a story and releasing it to others exposes the tinkerer to at least a
5384 requirement of justification. However troubling the expansion with respect
5385 to copying a particular work, it is extraordinarily troubling with respect
5386 to transformative uses of creative work.
5389 Third, this shift from category
1 to category
2 puts an extraordinary burden
5390 on category
3 ("fair use") that fair use never before had to bear. If a
5391 copyright owner now tried to control how many times I could read a book
5392 on-line, the natural response would be to argue that this is a violation of
5393 my fair use rights. But there has never been any litigation about whether I
5394 have a fair use right to read, because before the Internet, reading did not
5395 trigger the application of copyright law and hence the need for a fair use
5396 defense. The right to read was effectively protected before because reading
5399 This point about fair use is totally ignored, even by advocates for free
5400 culture. We have been cornered into arguing that our rights depend upon fair
5401 use
—never even addressing the earlier question about the expansion in
5402 effective regulation. A thin protection grounded in fair use makes sense
5403 when the vast majority of uses are
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>unregulated
</em></span>. But
5404 when everything becomes presumptively regulated, then the protections of
5405 fair use are not enough.
5407 The case of Video Pipeline is a good example. Video Pipeline was in the
5408 business of making "trailer" advertisements for movies available to video
5409 stores. The video stores displayed the trailers as a way to sell
5410 videos. Video Pipeline got the trailers from the film distributors, put the
5411 trailers on tape, and sold the tapes to the retail stores.
5413 The company did this for about fifteen years. Then, in
1997, it began to
5414 think about the Internet as another way to distribute these previews. The
5415 idea was to expand their "selling by sampling" technique by giving on-line
5416 stores the same ability to enable "browsing." Just as in a bookstore you can
5417 read a few pages of a book before you buy the book, so, too, you would be
5418 able to sample a bit from the movie on-line before you bought it.
5421 In
1998, Video Pipeline informed Disney and other film distributors that it
5422 intended to distribute the trailers through the Internet (rather than
5423 sending the tapes) to distributors of their videos. Two years later, Disney
5424 told Video Pipeline to stop. The owner of Video Pipeline asked Disney to
5425 talk about the matter
—he had built a business on distributing this
5426 content as a way to help sell Disney films; he had customers who depended
5427 upon his delivering this content. Disney would agree to talk only if Video
5428 Pipeline stopped the distribution immediately. Video Pipeline thought it
5429 was within their "fair use" rights to distribute the clips as they had. So
5430 they filed a lawsuit to ask the court to declare that these rights were in
5433 Disney countersued
—for $
100 million in damages. Those damages were
5434 predicated upon a claim that Video Pipeline had "willfully infringed" on
5435 Disney's copyright. When a court makes a finding of willful infringement, it
5436 can award damages not on the basis of the actual harm to the copyright
5437 owner, but on the basis of an amount set in the statute. Because Video
5438 Pipeline had distributed seven hundred clips of Disney movies to enable
5439 video stores to sell copies of those movies, Disney was now suing Video
5440 Pipeline for $
100 million.
5442 Disney has the right to control its property, of course. But the video
5443 stores that were selling Disney's films also had some sort of right to be
5444 able to sell the films that they had bought from Disney. Disney's claim in
5445 court was that the stores were allowed to sell the films and they were
5446 permitted to list the titles of the films they were selling, but they were
5447 not allowed to show clips of the films as a way of selling them without
5448 Disney's permission.
5450 Now, you might think this is a close case, and I think the courts would
5451 consider it a close case. My point here is to map the change that gives
5452 Disney this power. Before the Internet, Disney couldn't really control how
5453 people got access to their content. Once a video was in the marketplace, the
5454 "first-sale doctrine" would free the seller to use the video as he wished,
5455 including showing portions of it in order to engender sales of the entire
5456 movie video. But with the Internet, it becomes possible for Disney to
5457 centralize control over access to this content. Because each use of the
5458 Internet produces a copy, use on the Internet becomes subject to the
5459 copyright owner's control. The technology expands the scope of effective
5460 control, because the technology builds a copy into every transaction.
5464 No doubt, a potential is not yet an abuse, and so the potential for control
5465 is not yet the abuse of control. Barnes
& Noble has the right to say you
5466 can't touch a book in their store; property law gives them that right. But
5467 the market effectively protects against that abuse. If Barnes
& Noble
5468 banned browsing, then consumers would choose other bookstores. Competition
5469 protects against the extremes. And it may well be (my argument so far does
5470 not even question this) that competition would prevent any similar danger
5471 when it comes to copyright. Sure, publishers exercising the rights that
5472 authors have assigned to them might try to regulate how many times you read
5473 a book, or try to stop you from sharing the book with anyone. But in a
5474 competitive market such as the book market, the dangers of this happening
5477 Again, my aim so far is simply to map the changes that this changed
5478 architecture enables. Enabling technology to enforce the control of
5479 copyright means that the control of copyright is no longer defined by
5480 balanced policy. The control of copyright is simply what private owners
5481 choose. In some contexts, at least, that fact is harmless. But in some
5482 contexts it is a recipe for disaster.
5483 </p></div><div class=
"section" title=
"Arkitektur og lov: Makt"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h2 class=
"title" style=
"clear: both"><a name=
"lawforce"></a>Arkitektur og lov: Makt
</h2></div></div></div><p>
5484 The disappearance of unregulated uses would be change enough, but a second
5485 important change brought about by the Internet magnifies its
5486 significance. This second change does not affect the reach of copyright
5487 regulation; it affects how such regulation is enforced.
5489 In the world before digital technology, it was generally the law that
5490 controlled whether and how someone was regulated by copyright law. The law,
5491 meaning a court, meaning a judge: In the end, it was a human, trained in the
5492 tradition of the law and cognizant of the balances that tradition embraced,
5493 who said whether and how the law would restrict your freedom.
5494 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2593533"></a><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"idxmarxbrothers"></a><p>
5495 Det er en berømt historie om en kamp mellom Marx-brødrene (the Marx
5496 Brothers) og Warner Brothers. Marx-brødrene planla å lage en parodi av
5497 <em class=
"citetitle">Casablanca
</em>. Warner Brothers protesterte. De skrev et
5498 ufint brev til Marx-brødrene og advarte dem om at det ville få seriøse
5499 juridiske konsekvenser hvis de gikk videre med sin plan.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2593568" href=
"#ftn.id2593568" class=
"footnote">136</a>]
</sup>
5501 Dette fikk Marx-brødrene til å svare tilbake med samme mynt. De advarte
5502 Warner Brothers om at Marx-brødrene "var brødre lenge før dere var
5503 det".
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2593589" href=
"#ftn.id2593589" class=
"footnote">137</a>]
</sup> Marx-brødrene eide derfor ordet
5504 <em class=
"citetitle">Brothers
</em>, og hvis Warner Brothers insisterte på å
5505 forsøke å kontrollere
<em class=
"citetitle">Casablanca
</em>, så ville
5506 Marx-brødrene insistere på kontroll over
<em class=
"citetitle">Brothers
</em>.
5508 Det var en absurd og hul trussel, selvfølgelig, fordi Warner Brothers, på
5509 samme måte som Marx-brødrene, visste at ingen domstol noensinne ville
5510 håndheve et slikt dumt krav. Denne ekstremismen var irrelevant for de ekte
5511 friheter som alle (inkludert Warner Brothers) nøt godt av.
5513 On the Internet, however, there is no check on silly rules, because on the
5514 Internet, increasingly, rules are enforced not by a human but by a machine:
5515 Increasingly, the rules of copyright law, as interpreted by the copyright
5516 owner, get built into the technology that delivers copyrighted content. It
5517 is code, rather than law, that rules. And the problem with code regulations
5518 is that, unlike law, code has no shame. Code would not get the humor of the
5519 Marx Brothers. The consequence of that is not at all funny.
5520 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2593647"></a><p>
5521 La oss se på livet til min Adobe eBook Reader.
5523 En ebok er en bok levert i elektronisk form. En Adobe eBook er ikke en bok
5524 som Adobe har publisert. Adobe produserer kun programvaren som utgivere
5525 bruker å levere e-bøker. Den bidrar med teknologien, og utgiveren leverer
5526 innholdet ved hjelp av teknologien.
5528 On the next page is a picture of an old version of my Adobe eBook Reader.
5531 As you can see, I have a small collection of e-books within this e-book
5532 library. Some of these books reproduce content that is in the public domain:
5533 <em class=
"citetitle">Middlemarch
</em>, for example, is in the public domain.
5534 Some of them reproduce content that is not in the public domain: My own book
5535 <em class=
"citetitle">The Future of Ideas
</em> is not yet within the public
5536 domain. Consider
<em class=
"citetitle">Middlemarch
</em> first. If you click on
5537 my e-book copy of
<em class=
"citetitle">Middlemarch
</em>, you'll see a fancy
5538 cover, and then a button at the bottom called Permissions.
5539 </p><div class=
"figure"><a name=
"fig-1611"></a><p class=
"title"><b>Figur
11.12. Bilde av en gammel versjon av Adobe eBook Reader.
</b></p><div class=
"figure-contents"><div><img src=
"images/1611.png" alt=
"Bilde av en gammel versjon av Adobe eBook Reader."></div></div></div><br class=
"figure-break"><p>
5540 If you click on the Permissions button, you'll see a list of the permissions
5541 that the publisher purports to grant with this book.
5542 </p><div class=
"figure"><a name=
"fig-1612"></a><p class=
"title"><b>Figur
11.13. List of the permissions that the publisher purports to grant.
</b></p><div class=
"figure-contents"><div><img src=
"images/1612.png" alt=
"List of the permissions that the publisher purports to grant."></div></div></div><br class=
"figure-break"><p>
5545 According to my eBook Reader, I have the permission to copy to the clipboard
5546 of the computer ten text selections every ten days. (So far, I've copied no
5547 text to the clipboard.) I also have the permission to print ten pages from
5548 the book every ten days. Lastly, I have the permission to use the Read Aloud
5549 button to hear
<em class=
"citetitle">Middlemarch
</em> read aloud through the
5552 Here's the e-book for another work in the public domain (including the
5553 translation): Aristotle's
<em class=
"citetitle">Politics
</em>.
5554 </p><div class=
"figure"><a name=
"fig-1621"></a><p class=
"title"><b>Figur
11.14. E-book of Aristotle;s "Politics"
</b></p><div class=
"figure-contents"><div><img src=
"images/1621.png" alt='E-book of Aristotle;s
"Politics"'
></div></div></div><br class=
"figure-break"><p>
5555 According to its permissions, no printing or copying is permitted at
5556 all. But fortunately, you can use the Read Aloud button to hear the book.
5557 </p><div class=
"figure"><a name=
"fig-1622"></a><p class=
"title"><b>Figur
11.15. Liste med tillatelser for Aristotles "Politics".
</b></p><div class=
"figure-contents"><div><img src=
"images/1622.png" alt='Liste med tillatelser for Aristotles
"Politics".'
></div></div></div><br class=
"figure-break"><p>
5558 Finally (and most embarrassingly), here are the permissions for the original
5559 e-book version of my last book,
<em class=
"citetitle">The Future of Ideas
</em>:
5560 </p><div class=
"figure"><a name=
"fig-1631"></a><p class=
"title"><b>Figur
11.16. List of the permissions for "The Future of Ideas".
</b></p><div class=
"figure-contents"><div><img src=
"images/1631.png" alt='List of the permissions for
"The Future of Ideas".'
></div></div></div><br class=
"figure-break"><p>
5561 Ingen kopiering, ingen utskrift, og våg ikke å prøve å lytte til denne
5564 Now, the Adobe eBook Reader calls these controls "permissions"
— as if
5565 the publisher has the power to control how you use these works. For works
5566 under copyright, the copyright owner certainly does have the power
—up
5567 to the limits of the copyright law. But for work not under copyright, there
5568 is no such copyright power.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2593830" href=
"#ftn.id2593830" class=
"footnote">138</a>]
</sup> When my
5569 e-book of
<em class=
"citetitle">Middlemarch
</em> says I have the permission to
5570 copy only ten text selections into the memory every ten days, what that
5571 really means is that the eBook Reader has enabled the publisher to control
5572 how I use the book on my computer, far beyond the control that the law would
5575 The control comes instead from the code
—from the technology within
5576 which the e-book "lives." Though the e-book says that these are permissions,
5577 they are not the sort of "permissions" that most of us deal with. When a
5578 teenager gets "permission" to stay out till midnight, she knows (unless
5579 she's Cinderella) that she can stay out till
2 A.M., but will suffer a
5580 punishment if she's caught. But when the Adobe eBook Reader says I have the
5581 permission to make ten copies of the text into the computer's memory, that
5582 means that after I've made ten copies, the computer will not make any
5583 more. The same with the printing restrictions: After ten pages, the eBook
5584 Reader will not print any more pages. It's the same with the silly
5585 restriction that says that you can't use the Read Aloud button to read my
5586 book aloud
—it's not that the company will sue you if you do; instead,
5587 if you push the Read Aloud button with my book, the machine simply won't
5591 These are
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>controls
</em></span>, not permissions. Imagine a world
5592 where the Marx Brothers sold word processing software that, when you tried
5593 to type "Warner Brothers," erased "Brothers" from the sentence.
5594 <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2593885"></a>
5596 This is the future of copyright law: not so much copyright
5597 <span class=
"emphasis"><em>law
</em></span> as copyright
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>code
</em></span>. The
5598 controls over access to content will not be controls that are ratified by
5599 courts; the controls over access to content will be controls that are coded
5600 by programmers. And whereas the controls that are built into the law are
5601 always to be checked by a judge, the controls that are built into the
5602 technology have no similar built-in check.
5604 How significant is this? Isn't it always possible to get around the controls
5605 built into the technology? Software used to be sold with technologies that
5606 limited the ability of users to copy the software, but those were trivial
5607 protections to defeat. Why won't it be trivial to defeat these protections
5610 We've only scratched the surface of this story. Return to the Adobe eBook
5613 Early in the life of the Adobe eBook Reader, Adobe suffered a public
5614 relations nightmare. Among the books that you could download for free on the
5615 Adobe site was a copy of
<em class=
"citetitle">Alice's Adventures in
5616 Wonderland
</em>. This wonderful book is in the public domain. Yet
5617 when you clicked on Permissions for that book, you got the following report:
5618 </p><div class=
"figure"><a name=
"fig-1641"></a><p class=
"title"><b>Figur
11.17. List of the permissions for "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland".
</b></p><div class=
"figure-contents"><div><img src=
"images/1641.png" alt=
"List of the permissions for "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"."></div></div></div><br class=
"figure-break"><p>
5621 Here was a public domain children's book that you were not allowed to copy,
5622 not allowed to lend, not allowed to give, and, as the "permissions"
5623 indicated, not allowed to "read aloud"!
5625 The public relations nightmare attached to that final permission. For the
5626 text did not say that you were not permitted to use the Read Aloud button;
5627 it said you did not have the permission to read the book aloud. That led
5628 some people to think that Adobe was restricting the right of parents, for
5629 example, to read the book to their children, which seemed, to say the least,
5632 Adobe responded quickly that it was absurd to think that it was trying to
5633 restrict the right to read a book aloud. Obviously it was only restricting
5634 the ability to use the Read Aloud button to have the book read aloud. But
5635 the question Adobe never did answer is this: Would Adobe thus agree that a
5636 consumer was free to use software to hack around the restrictions built into
5637 the eBook Reader? If some company (call it Elcomsoft) developed a program to
5638 disable the technological protection built into an Adobe eBook so that a
5639 blind person, say, could use a computer to read the book aloud, would Adobe
5640 agree that such a use of an eBook Reader was fair? Adobe didn't answer
5641 because the answer, however absurd it might seem, is no.
5643 The point is not to blame Adobe. Indeed, Adobe is among the most innovative
5644 companies developing strategies to balance open access to content with
5645 incentives for companies to innovate. But Adobe's technology enables
5646 control, and Adobe has an incentive to defend this control. That incentive
5647 is understandable, yet what it creates is often crazy.
5649 To see the point in a particularly absurd context, consider a favorite story
5650 of mine that makes the same point.
5651 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"idxaibo"></a><p>
5652 Consider the robotic dog made by Sony named "Aibo." The Aibo learns tricks,
5653 cuddles, and follows you around. It eats only electricity and that doesn't
5654 leave that much of a mess (at least in your house).
5657 The Aibo is expensive and popular. Fans from around the world have set up
5658 clubs to trade stories. One fan in particular set up a Web site to enable
5659 information about the Aibo dog to be shared. This fan set up aibopet.com
5660 (and aibohack.com, but that resolves to the same site), and on that site he
5661 provided information about how to teach an Aibo to do tricks in addition to
5662 the ones Sony had taught it.
5664 "Teach" here has a special meaning. Aibos are just cute computers. You
5665 teach a computer how to do something by programming it differently. So to
5666 say that aibopet.com was giving information about how to teach the dog to do
5667 new tricks is just to say that aibopet.com was giving information to users
5668 of the Aibo pet about how to hack their computer "dog" to make it do new
5669 tricks (thus, aibohack.com).
5671 If you're not a programmer or don't know many programmers, the word
5672 <em class=
"citetitle">hack
</em> has a particularly unfriendly
5673 connotation. Nonprogrammers hack bushes or weeds. Nonprogrammers in horror
5674 movies do even worse. But to programmers, or coders, as I call them,
5675 <em class=
"citetitle">hack
</em> is a much more positive
5676 term.
<em class=
"citetitle">Hack
</em> just means code that enables the program
5677 to do something it wasn't originally intended or enabled to do. If you buy a
5678 new printer for an old computer, you might find the old computer doesn't
5679 run, or "drive," the printer. If you discovered that, you'd later be happy
5680 to discover a hack on the Net by someone who has written a driver to enable
5681 the computer to drive the printer you just bought.
5683 Some hacks are easy. Some are unbelievably hard. Hackers as a community like
5684 to challenge themselves and others with increasingly difficult
5685 tasks. There's a certain respect that goes with the talent to hack
5686 well. There's a well-deserved respect that goes with the talent to hack
5689 The Aibo fan was displaying a bit of both when he hacked the program and
5690 offered to the world a bit of code that would enable the Aibo to dance
5691 jazz. The dog wasn't programmed to dance jazz. It was a clever bit of
5692 tinkering that turned the dog into a more talented creature than Sony had
5694 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2594084"></a><p>
5696 I've told this story in many contexts, both inside and outside the United
5697 States. Once I was asked by a puzzled member of the audience, is it
5698 permissible for a dog to dance jazz in the United States? We forget that
5699 stories about the backcountry still flow across much of the world. So let's
5700 just be clear before we continue: It's not a crime anywhere (anymore) to
5701 dance jazz. Nor is it a crime to teach your dog to dance jazz. Nor should it
5702 be a crime (though we don't have a lot to go on here) to teach your robot
5703 dog to dance jazz. Dancing jazz is a completely legal activity. One imagines
5704 that the owner of aibopet.com thought,
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>What possible problem could
5705 there be with teaching a robot dog to dance?
</em></span>
5707 Let's put the dog to sleep for a minute, and turn to a pony show
— not
5708 literally a pony show, but rather a paper that a Princeton academic named Ed
5709 Felten prepared for a conference. This Princeton academic is well known and
5710 respected. He was hired by the government in the Microsoft case to test
5711 Microsoft's claims about what could and could not be done with its own
5712 code. In that trial, he demonstrated both his brilliance and his
5713 coolness. Under heavy badgering by Microsoft lawyers, Ed Felten stood his
5714 ground. He was not about to be bullied into being silent about something he
5717 But Felten's bravery was really tested in April
2001.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2594139" href=
"#ftn.id2594139" class=
"footnote">139</a>]
</sup> He and a group of colleagues were working on a
5718 paper to be submitted at conference. The paper was intended to describe the
5719 weakness in an encryption system being developed by the Secure Digital Music
5720 Initiative as a technique to control the distribution of music.
5722 The SDMI coalition had as its goal a technology to enable content owners to
5723 exercise much better control over their content than the Internet, as it
5724 originally stood, granted them. Using encryption, SDMI hoped to develop a
5725 standard that would allow the content owner to say "this music cannot be
5726 copied," and have a computer respect that command. The technology was to be
5727 part of a "trusted system" of control that would get content owners to trust
5728 the system of the Internet much more.
5730 When SDMI thought it was close to a standard, it set up a competition. In
5731 exchange for providing contestants with the code to an SDMI-encrypted bit of
5732 content, contestants were to try to crack it and, if they did, report the
5733 problems to the consortium.
5737 Felten and his team figured out the encryption system quickly. He and the
5738 team saw the weakness of this system as a type: Many encryption systems
5739 would suffer the same weakness, and Felten and his team thought it
5740 worthwhile to point this out to those who study encryption.
5742 Let's review just what Felten was doing. Again, this is the United
5743 States. We have a principle of free speech. We have this principle not just
5744 because it is the law, but also because it is a really great idea. A
5745 strongly protected tradition of free speech is likely to encourage a wide
5746 range of criticism. That criticism is likely, in turn, to improve the
5747 systems or people or ideas criticized.
5749 What Felten and his colleagues were doing was publishing a paper describing
5750 the weakness in a technology. They were not spreading free music, or
5751 building and deploying this technology. The paper was an academic essay,
5752 unintelligible to most people. But it clearly showed the weakness in the
5753 SDMI system, and why SDMI would not, as presently constituted, succeed.
5755 What links these two, aibopet.com and Felten, is the letters they then
5756 received. Aibopet.com received a letter from Sony about the aibopet.com
5757 hack. Though a jazz-dancing dog is perfectly legal, Sony wrote:
5758 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
5759 Your site contains information providing the means to circumvent AIBO-ware's
5760 copy protection protocol constituting a violation of the anti-circumvention
5761 provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
5762 </p></blockquote></div><p>
5763 And though an academic paper describing the weakness in a system of
5764 encryption should also be perfectly legal, Felten received a letter from an
5765 RIAA lawyer that read:
5766 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
5768 Any disclosure of information gained from participating in the Public
5769 Challenge would be outside the scope of activities permitted by the
5770 Agreement and could subject you and your research team to actions under the
5771 Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA").
5772 </p></blockquote></div><p>
5773 In both cases, this weirdly Orwellian law was invoked to control the spread
5774 of information. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made spreading such
5775 information an offense.
5777 The DMCA was enacted as a response to copyright owners' first fear about
5778 cyberspace. The fear was that copyright control was effectively dead; the
5779 response was to find technologies that might compensate. These new
5780 technologies would be copyright protection technologies
— technologies
5781 to control the replication and distribution of copyrighted material. They
5782 were designed as
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>code
</em></span> to modify the original
5783 <span class=
"emphasis"><em>code
</em></span> of the Internet, to reestablish some protection
5784 for copyright owners.
5786 The DMCA was a bit of law intended to back up the protection of this code
5787 designed to protect copyrighted material. It was, we could say,
5788 <span class=
"emphasis"><em>legal code
</em></span> intended to buttress
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>software
5789 code
</em></span> which itself was intended to support the
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>legal
5790 code of copyright
</em></span>.
5792 But the DMCA was not designed merely to protect copyrighted works to the
5793 extent copyright law protected them. Its protection, that is, did not end at
5794 the line that copyright law drew. The DMCA regulated devices that were
5795 designed to circumvent copyright protection measures. It was designed to ban
5796 those devices, whether or not the use of the copyrighted material made
5797 possible by that circumvention would have been a copyright violation.
5800 Aibopet.com and Felten make the point. The Aibo hack circumvented a
5801 copyright protection system for the purpose of enabling the dog to dance
5802 jazz. That enablement no doubt involved the use of copyrighted material. But
5803 as aibopet.com's site was noncommercial, and the use did not enable
5804 subsequent copyright infringements, there's no doubt that aibopet.com's hack
5805 was fair use of Sony's copyrighted material. Yet fair use is not a defense
5806 to the DMCA. The question is not whether the use of the copyrighted material
5807 was a copyright violation. The question is whether a copyright protection
5808 system was circumvented.
5810 The threat against Felten was more attenuated, but it followed the same line
5811 of reasoning. By publishing a paper describing how a copyright protection
5812 system could be circumvented, the RIAA lawyer suggested, Felten himself was
5813 distributing a circumvention technology. Thus, even though he was not
5814 himself infringing anyone's copyright, his academic paper was enabling
5815 others to infringe others' copyright.
5817 The bizarreness of these arguments is captured in a cartoon drawn in
1981 by
5818 Paul Conrad. At that time, a court in California had held that the VCR could
5819 be banned because it was a copyright-infringing technology: It enabled
5820 consumers to copy films without the permission of the copyright owner. No
5821 doubt there were uses of the technology that were legal: Fred Rogers, aka
5822 "
<em class=
"citetitle">Mr. Rogers
</em>," for example, had testified in that case
5823 that he wanted people to feel free to tape Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood.
5824 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
5825 Some public stations, as well as commercial stations, program the
5826 "Neighborhood" at hours when some children cannot use it. I think that it's
5827 a real service to families to be able to record such programs and show them
5828 at appropriate times. I have always felt that with the advent of all of this
5829 new technology that allows people to tape the "Neighborhood" off-the-air,
5830 and I'm speaking for the "Neighborhood" because that's what I produce, that
5831 they then become much more active in the programming of their family's
5832 television life. Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by
5833 others. My whole approach in broadcasting has always been "You are an
5834 important person just the way you are. You can make healthy decisions."
5835 Maybe I'm going on too long, but I just feel that anything that allows a
5836 person to be more active in the control of his or her life, in a healthy
5837 way, is important.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2594402" href=
"#ftn.id2594402" class=
"footnote">140</a>]
</sup>
5838 </p></blockquote></div><p>
5841 Even though there were uses that were legal, because there were some uses
5842 that were illegal, the court held the companies producing the VCR
5845 This led Conrad to draw the cartoon below, which we can adopt to the DMCA.
5847 No argument I have can top this picture, but let me try to get close.
5849 The anticircumvention provisions of the DMCA target copyright circumvention
5850 technologies. Circumvention technologies can be used for different
5851 ends. They can be used, for example, to enable massive pirating of
5852 copyrighted material
—a bad end. Or they can be used to enable the use
5853 of particular copyrighted materials in ways that would be considered fair
5854 use
—a good end.
5857 A handgun can be used to shoot a police officer or a child. Most would agree
5858 such a use is bad. Or a handgun can be used for target practice or to
5859 protect against an intruder. At least some would say that such a use would
5860 be good. It, too, is a technology that has both good and bad uses.
5861 </p><div class=
"figure"><a name=
"fig-1711"></a><p class=
"title"><b>Figur
11.18. VCR/handgun cartoon.
</b></p><div class=
"figure-contents"><div><img src=
"images/1711.png" alt=
"VCR/handgun cartoon."></div></div></div><br class=
"figure-break"><p>
5862 The obvious point of Conrad's cartoon is the weirdness of a world where guns
5863 are legal, despite the harm they can do, while VCRs (and circumvention
5864 technologies) are illegal. Flash:
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>No one ever died from copyright
5865 circumvention
</em></span>. Yet the law bans circumvention technologies
5866 absolutely, despite the potential that they might do some good, but permits
5867 guns, despite the obvious and tragic harm they do.
5869 The Aibo and RIAA examples demonstrate how copyright owners are changing the
5870 balance that copyright law grants. Using code, copyright owners restrict
5871 fair use; using the DMCA, they punish those who would attempt to evade the
5872 restrictions on fair use that they impose through code. Technology becomes a
5873 means by which fair use can be erased; the law of the DMCA backs up that
5876 This is how
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>code
</em></span> becomes
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>law
</em></span>. The
5877 controls built into the technology of copy and access protection become
5878 rules the violation of which is also a violation of the law. In this way,
5879 the code extends the law
—increasing its regulation, even if the
5880 subject it regulates (activities that would otherwise plainly constitute
5881 fair use) is beyond the reach of the law. Code becomes law; code extends the
5882 law; code thus extends the control that copyright owners effect
—at
5883 least for those copyright holders with the lawyers who can write the nasty
5884 letters that Felten and aibopet.com received.
5886 There is one final aspect of the interaction between architecture and law
5887 that contributes to the force of copyright's regulation. This is the ease
5888 with which infringements of the law can be detected. For contrary to the
5889 rhetoric common at the birth of cyberspace that on the Internet, no one
5890 knows you're a dog, increasingly, given changing technologies deployed on
5891 the Internet, it is easy to find the dog who committed a legal wrong. The
5892 technologies of the Internet are open to snoops as well as sharers, and the
5893 snoops are increasingly good at tracking down the identity of those who
5898 For example, imagine you were part of a
<em class=
"citetitle">Star Trek
</em> fan
5899 club. You gathered every month to share trivia, and maybe to enact a kind of
5900 fan fiction about the show. One person would play Spock, another, Captain
5901 Kirk. The characters would begin with a plot from a real story, then simply
5902 continue it.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2594552" href=
"#ftn.id2594552" class=
"footnote">141</a>]
</sup>
5904 Before the Internet, this was, in effect, a totally unregulated activity.
5905 No matter what happened inside your club room, you would never be interfered
5906 with by the copyright police. You were free in that space to do as you
5907 wished with this part of our culture. You were allowed to build on it as you
5908 wished without fear of legal control.
5910 But if you moved your club onto the Internet, and made it generally
5911 available for others to join, the story would be very different. Bots
5912 scouring the Net for trademark and copyright infringement would quickly find
5913 your site. Your posting of fan fiction, depending upon the ownership of the
5914 series that you're depicting, could well inspire a lawyer's threat. And
5915 ignoring the lawyer's threat would be extremely costly indeed. The law of
5916 copyright is extremely efficient. The penalties are severe, and the process
5919 This change in the effective force of the law is caused by a change in the
5920 ease with which the law can be enforced. That change too shifts the law's
5921 balance radically. It is as if your car transmitted the speed at which you
5922 traveled at every moment that you drove; that would be just one step before
5923 the state started issuing tickets based upon the data you transmitted. That
5924 is, in effect, what is happening here.
5925 </p></div><div class=
"section" title=
"Marked: Konsentrasjon"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h2 class=
"title" style=
"clear: both"><a name=
"marketconcentration"></a>Marked: Konsentrasjon
</h2></div></div></div><p>
5927 So copyright's duration has increased dramatically
—tripled in the past
5928 thirty years. And copyright's scope has increased as well
—from
5929 regulating only publishers to now regulating just about everyone. And
5930 copyright's reach has changed, as every action becomes a copy and hence
5931 presumptively regulated. And as technologists find better ways to control
5932 the use of content, and as copyright is increasingly enforced through
5933 technology, copyright's force changes, too. Misuse is easier to find and
5934 easier to control. This regulation of the creative process, which began as a
5935 tiny regulation governing a tiny part of the market for creative work, has
5936 become the single most important regulator of creativity there is. It is a
5937 massive expansion in the scope of the government's control over innovation
5938 and creativity; it would be totally unrecognizable to those who gave birth
5939 to copyright's control.
5941 Still, in my view, all of these changes would not matter much if it weren't
5942 for one more change that we must also consider. This is a change that is in
5943 some sense the most familiar, though its significance and scope are not well
5944 understood. It is the one that creates precisely the reason to be concerned
5945 about all the other changes I have described.
5947 This is the change in the concentration and integration of the media. In
5948 the past twenty years, the nature of media ownership has undergone a radical
5949 alteration, caused by changes in legal rules governing the media. Before
5950 this change happened, the different forms of media were owned by separate
5951 media companies. Now, the media is increasingly owned by only a few
5952 companies. Indeed, after the changes that the FCC announced in June
2003,
5953 most expect that within a few years, we will live in a world where just
5954 three companies control more than percent of the media.
5956 Det er her to sorter endringer: omfanget av konsentrasjon, og dens natur.
5957 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2594665"></a><p>
5958 Changes in scope are the easier ones to describe. As Senator John McCain
5959 summarized the data produced in the FCC's review of media ownership, "five
5960 companies control
85 percent of our media sources."
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2594676" href=
"#ftn.id2594676" class=
"footnote">142</a>]
</sup> The five recording labels of Universal Music Group,
5961 BMG, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, and EMI control
84.8
5962 percent of the U.S. music market.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2594688" href=
"#ftn.id2594688" class=
"footnote">143</a>]
</sup> The
5963 "five largest cable companies pipe programming to
74 percent of the cable
5964 subscribers nationwide."
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2594701" href=
"#ftn.id2594701" class=
"footnote">144</a>]
</sup> <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2594712"></a>
5967 The story with radio is even more dramatic. Before deregulation, the
5968 nation's largest radio broadcasting conglomerate owned fewer than
5969 seventy-five stations. Today
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>one
</em></span> company owns more than
5970 1,
200 stations. During that period of consolidation, the total number of
5971 radio owners dropped by
34 percent. Today, in most markets, the two largest
5972 broadcasters control
74 percent of that market's revenues. Overall, just
5973 four companies control
90 percent of the nation's radio advertising
5976 Newspaper ownership is becoming more concentrated as well. Today, there are
5977 six hundred fewer daily newspapers in the United States than there were
5978 eighty years ago, and ten companies control half of the nation's
5979 circulation. There are twenty major newspaper publishers in the United
5980 States. The top ten film studios receive
99 percent of all film revenue. The
5981 ten largest cable companies account for
85 percent of all cable
5982 revenue. This is a market far from the free press the framers sought to
5983 protect. Indeed, it is a market that is quite well protected
— by the
5986 Concentration in size alone is one thing. The more invidious change is in
5987 the nature of that concentration. As author James Fallows put it in a recent
5988 article about Rupert Murdoch,
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2594744"></a>
5989 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
5990 Murdoch's companies now constitute a production system unmatched in its
5991 integration. They supply content
—Fox movies . . . Fox TV shows
5992 . . . Fox-controlled sports broadcasts, plus newspapers and books. They sell
5993 the content to the public and to advertisers
—in newspapers, on the
5994 broadcast network, on the cable channels. And they operate the physical
5995 distribution system through which the content reaches the
5996 customers. Murdoch's satellite systems now distribute News Corp. content in
5997 Europe and Asia; if Murdoch becomes DirecTV's largest single owner, that
5998 system will serve the same function in the United States.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2594768" href=
"#ftn.id2594768" class=
"footnote">145</a>]
</sup>
5999 </p></blockquote></div><p>
6000 The pattern with Murdoch is the pattern of modern media. Not just large
6001 companies owning many radio stations, but a few companies owning as many
6002 outlets of media as possible. A picture describes this pattern better than a
6003 thousand words could do:
6004 </p><div class=
"figure"><a name=
"fig-1761"></a><p class=
"title"><b>Figur
11.19. Mønster for moderne mediaeierskap.
</b></p><div class=
"figure-contents"><div><img src=
"images/1761.png" alt=
"Mønster for moderne mediaeierskap."></div></div></div><br class=
"figure-break"><p>
6007 Betyr denne konsentrasjonen noe? Påvirker det hva som blir laget, eller hva
6008 som blir distribuert? Eller er det bare en mer effektiv måte å produsere og
6009 distribuere innhold?
6011 Mitt syn var at konsentrasjonen ikke betød noe. Jeg tenkte det ikke var noe
6012 mer enn en mer effektiv finansiell struktur. Men nå, etter å ha lest og
6013 hørt på en haug av skapere prøve å overbevise meg om det motsatte, har jeg
6014 begynt å endre mening.
6016 Her er en representativ historie som kan foreslå hvorfor denne integreringen
6018 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2594848"></a><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2594854"></a><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2594860"></a><p>
6019 I
1969 laget Norman Lear en polit for
<em class=
"citetitle">All in the
6020 Family
</em>. Han tok piloten til ABC, og nettverket likte det ikke.
6021 Da sa til Lear at det var for på kanten. Gjør det om igjen. Lear lagde
6022 piloten på nytt, mer på kanten enn den første. ABC ble fra seg. Du får
6023 ikke med deg poenget, fortalte de Lear. Vi vil ha det mindre på kanten,
6026 I stedet for å føye seg, to Lear ganske enkelt serien sin til noen andre.
6027 CBS var glad for å ha seriene, og ABC kunne ikke stoppe Lear fra å gå til
6028 andre. Opphavsretten som Lear hadde sikret uavhengighet fra
6029 nettverk-kontroll.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2594894" href=
"#ftn.id2594894" class=
"footnote">146</a>]
</sup>
6034 The network did not control those copyrights because the law forbade the
6035 networks from controlling the content they syndicated. The law required a
6036 separation between the networks and the content producers; that separation
6037 would guarantee Lear freedom. And as late as
1992, because of these rules,
6038 the vast majority of prime time television
—75 percent of it
—was
6039 "independent" of the networks.
6041 In
1994, the FCC abandoned the rules that required this independence. After
6042 that change, the networks quickly changed the balance. In
1985, there were
6043 twenty-five independent television production studios; in
2002, only five
6044 independent television studios remained. "In
1992, only
15 percent of new
6045 series were produced for a network by a company it controlled. Last year,
6046 the percentage of shows produced by controlled companies more than
6047 quintupled to
77 percent." "In
1992,
16 new series were produced
6048 independently of conglomerate control, last year there was one."
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2594924" href=
"#ftn.id2594924" class=
"footnote">147</a>]
</sup> In
2002,
75 percent of prime time television was
6049 owned by the networks that ran it. "In the ten-year period between
1992 and
6050 2002, the number of prime time television hours per week produced by network
6051 studios increased over
200%, whereas the number of prime time television
6052 hours per week produced by independent studios decreased
63%."
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2594967" href=
"#ftn.id2594967" class=
"footnote">148</a>]
</sup>
6053 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2594975"></a><p>
6054 Today, another Norman Lear with another
<em class=
"citetitle">All in the
6055 Family
</em> would find that he had the choice either to make the show
6056 less edgy or to be fired: The content of any show developed for a network is
6057 increasingly owned by the network.
6059 While the number of channels has increased dramatically, the ownership of
6060 those channels has narrowed to an ever smaller and smaller few. As Barry
6061 Diller said to Bill Moyers,
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2594996"></a>
6062 <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2595002"></a>
6063 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
6064 Well, if you have companies that produce, that finance, that air on their
6065 channel and then distribute worldwide everything that goes through their
6066 controlled distribution system, then what you get is fewer and fewer actual
6067 voices participating in the process. [We u]sed to have dozens and dozens of
6068 thriving independent production companies producing television programs. Now
6069 you have less than a handful.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2595021" href=
"#ftn.id2595021" class=
"footnote">149</a>]
</sup>
6070 </p></blockquote></div><p>
6071 This narrowing has an effect on what is produced. The product of such large
6072 and concentrated networks is increasingly homogenous. Increasingly
6073 safe. Increasingly sterile. The product of news shows from networks like
6074 this is increasingly tailored to the message the network wants to
6075 convey. This is not the communist party, though from the inside, it must
6076 feel a bit like the communist party. No one can question without risk of
6077 consequence
—not necessarily banishment to Siberia, but punishment
6078 nonetheless. Independent, critical, different views are quashed. This is not
6079 the environment for a democracy.
6080 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2595045"></a><p>
6081 Economics itself offers a parallel that explains why this integration
6082 affects creativity. Clay Christensen has written about the "Innovator's
6083 Dilemma": the fact that large traditional firms find it rational to ignore
6084 new, breakthrough technologies that compete with their core business. The
6085 same analysis could help explain why large, traditional media companies
6086 would find it rational to ignore new cultural trends.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2595073" href=
"#ftn.id2595073" class=
"footnote">150</a>]
</sup> Lumbering giants not only don't, but should not,
6087 sprint. Yet if the field is only open to the giants, there will be far too
6088 little sprinting.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2595101"></a>
6090 I don't think we know enough about the economics of the media market to say
6091 with certainty what concentration and integration will do. The efficiencies
6092 are important, and the effect on culture is hard to measure.
6094 But there is a quintessentially obvious example that does strongly suggest
6097 In addition to the copyright wars, we're in the middle of the drug
6098 wars. Government policy is strongly directed against the drug cartels;
6099 criminal and civil courts are filled with the consequences of this battle.
6102 Let me hereby disqualify myself from any possible appointment to any
6103 position in government by saying I believe this war is a profound mistake. I
6104 am not pro drugs. Indeed, I come from a family once wrecked by
6105 drugs
—though the drugs that wrecked my family were all quite legal. I
6106 believe this war is a profound mistake because the collateral damage from it
6107 is so great as to make waging the war insane. When you add together the
6108 burdens on the criminal justice system, the desperation of generations of
6109 kids whose only real economic opportunities are as drug warriors, the
6110 queering of constitutional protections because of the constant surveillance
6111 this war requires, and, most profoundly, the total destruction of the legal
6112 systems of many South American nations because of the power of the local
6113 drug cartels, I find it impossible to believe that the marginal benefit in
6114 reduced drug consumption by Americans could possibly outweigh these costs.
6116 You may not be convinced. That's fine. We live in a democracy, and it is
6117 through votes that we are to choose policy. But to do that, we depend
6118 fundamentally upon the press to help inform Americans about these issues.
6120 Beginning in
1998, the Office of National Drug Control Policy launched a
6121 media campaign as part of the "war on drugs." The campaign produced scores
6122 of short film clips about issues related to illegal drugs. In one series
6123 (the Nick and Norm series) two men are in a bar, discussing the idea of
6124 legalizing drugs as a way to avoid some of the collateral damage from the
6125 war. One advances an argument in favor of drug legalization. The other
6126 responds in a powerful and effective way against the argument of the
6127 first. In the end, the first guy changes his mind (hey, it's
6128 television). The plug at the end is a damning attack on the pro-legalization
6131 Fair enough. It's a good ad. Not terribly misleading. It delivers its
6132 message well. It's a fair and reasonable message.
6134 But let's say you think it is a wrong message, and you'd like to run a
6135 countercommercial. Say you want to run a series of ads that try to
6136 demonstrate the extraordinary collateral harm that comes from the drug
6140 Well, obviously, these ads cost lots of money. Assume you raise the
6141 money. Assume a group of concerned citizens donates all the money in the
6142 world to help you get your message out. Can you be sure your message will be
6145 No. You cannot. Television stations have a general policy of avoiding
6146 "controversial" ads. Ads sponsored by the government are deemed
6147 uncontroversial; ads disagreeing with the government are controversial.
6148 This selectivity might be thought inconsistent with the First Amendment, but
6149 the Supreme Court has held that stations have the right to choose what they
6150 run. Thus, the major channels of commercial media will refuse one side of a
6151 crucial debate the opportunity to present its case. And the courts will
6152 defend the rights of the stations to be this biased.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2595204" href=
"#ftn.id2595204" class=
"footnote">151</a>]
</sup>
6154 I'd be happy to defend the networks' rights, as well
—if we lived in a
6155 media market that was truly diverse. But concentration in the media throws
6156 that condition into doubt. If a handful of companies control access to the
6157 media, and that handful of companies gets to decide which political
6158 positions it will allow to be promoted on its channels, then in an obvious
6159 and important way, concentration matters. You might like the positions the
6160 handful of companies selects. But you should not like a world in which a
6161 mere few get to decide which issues the rest of us get to know about.
6162 </p></div><div class=
"section" title=
"Sammen"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h2 class=
"title" style=
"clear: both"><a name=
"together"></a>Sammen
</h2></div></div></div><p>
6163 There is something innocent and obvious about the claim of the copyright
6164 warriors that the government should "protect my property." In the abstract,
6165 it is obviously true and, ordinarily, totally harmless. No sane sort who is
6166 not an anarchist could disagree.
6169 But when we see how dramatically this "property" has changed
— when we
6170 recognize how it might now interact with both technology and markets to mean
6171 that the effective constraint on the liberty to cultivate our culture is
6172 dramatically different
—the claim begins to seem less innocent and
6173 obvious. Given (
1) the power of technology to supplement the law's control,
6174 and (
2) the power of concentrated markets to weaken the opportunity for
6175 dissent, if strictly enforcing the massively expanded "property" rights
6176 granted by copyright fundamentally changes the freedom within this culture
6177 to cultivate and build upon our past, then we have to ask whether this
6178 property should be redefined.
6180 Not starkly. Or absolutely. My point is not that we should abolish copyright
6181 or go back to the eighteenth century. That would be a total mistake,
6182 disastrous for the most important creative enterprises within our culture
6185 But there is a space between zero and one, Internet culture
6186 notwithstanding. And these massive shifts in the effective power of
6187 copyright regulation, tied to increased concentration of the content
6188 industry and resting in the hands of technology that will increasingly
6189 enable control over the use of culture, should drive us to consider whether
6190 another adjustment is called for. Not an adjustment that increases
6191 copyright's power. Not an adjustment that increases its term. Rather, an
6192 adjustment to restore the balance that has traditionally defined copyright's
6193 regulation
—a weakening of that regulation, to strengthen creativity.
6195 Copyright law has not been a rock of Gibraltar. It's not a set of constant
6196 commitments that, for some mysterious reason, teenagers and geeks now
6197 flout. Instead, copyright power has grown dramatically in a short period of
6198 time, as the technologies of distribution and creation have changed and as
6199 lobbyists have pushed for more control by copyright holders. Changes in the
6200 past in response to changes in technology suggest that we may well need
6201 similar changes in the future. And these changes have to be
6202 <span class=
"emphasis"><em>reductions
</em></span> in the scope of copyright, in response to
6203 the extraordinary increase in control that technology and the market enable.
6206 For the single point that is lost in this war on pirates is a point that we
6207 see only after surveying the range of these changes. When you add together
6208 the effect of changing law, concentrated markets, and changing technology,
6209 together they produce an astonishing conclusion:
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>Never in our
6210 history have fewer had a legal right to control more of the development of
6211 our culture than now
</em></span>.
6213 Not when copyrights were perpetual, for when copyrights were perpetual, they
6214 affected only that precise creative work. Not when only publishers had the
6215 tools to publish, for the market then was much more diverse. Not when there
6216 were only three television networks, for even then, newspapers, film
6217 studios, radio stations, and publishers were independent of the
6218 networks.
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>Never
</em></span> has copyright protected such a wide
6219 range of rights, against as broad a range of actors, for a term that was
6220 remotely as long. This form of regulation
—a tiny regulation of a tiny
6221 part of the creative energy of a nation at the founding
—is now a
6222 massive regulation of the overall creative process. Law plus technology plus
6223 the market now interact to turn this historically benign regulation into the
6224 most significant regulation of culture that our free society has
6225 known.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2595389" href=
"#ftn.id2595389" class=
"footnote">152</a>]
</sup>
6227 This has been a long chapter. Its point can now be briefly stated.
6229 At the start of this book, I distinguished between commercial and
6230 noncommercial culture. In the course of this chapter, I have distinguished
6231 between copying a work and transforming it. We can now combine these two
6232 distinctions and draw a clear map of the changes that copyright law has
6233 undergone. In
1790, the law looked like this:
6234 </p><div class=
"table"><a name=
"t2"></a><p class=
"title"><b>Tabell
11.1.
</b></p><div class=
"table-contents"><table summary=
"" border=
"1"><colgroup><col><col><col></colgroup><thead><tr><th align=
"char"> </th><th align=
"char">Publiser
</th><th align=
"char">TRANSFORM
</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td align=
"char">Kommersiell
</td><td align=
"char">©
</td><td align=
"char">Fri
</td></tr><tr><td align=
"char">Ikke-kommersiell
</td><td align=
"char">Fri
</td><td align=
"char">Fri
</td></tr></tbody></table></div></div><br class=
"table-break"><p>
6236 The act of publishing a map, chart, and book was regulated by copyright
6237 law. Nothing else was. Transformations were free. And as copyright attached
6238 only with registration, and only those who intended to benefit commercially
6239 would register, copying through publishing of noncommercial work was also
6242 By the end of the nineteenth century, the law had changed to this:
6243 </p><div class=
"table"><a name=
"t3"></a><p class=
"title"><b>Tabell
11.2.
</b></p><div class=
"table-contents"><table summary=
"" border=
"1"><colgroup><col><col><col></colgroup><thead><tr><th align=
"char"> </th><th align=
"char">Publiser
</th><th align=
"char">TRANSFORM
</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td align=
"char">Kommersiell
</td><td align=
"char">©
</td><td align=
"char">©
</td></tr><tr><td align=
"char">Ikke-kommersiell
</td><td align=
"char">Fri
</td><td align=
"char">Fri
</td></tr></tbody></table></div></div><br class=
"table-break"><p>
6244 Derivative works were now regulated by copyright law
—if published,
6245 which again, given the economics of publishing at the time, means if offered
6246 commercially. But noncommercial publishing and transformation were still
6249 In
1909 the law changed to regulate copies, not publishing, and after this
6250 change, the scope of the law was tied to technology. As the technology of
6251 copying became more prevalent, the reach of the law expanded. Thus by
1975,
6252 as photocopying machines became more common, we could say the law began to
6254 </p><div class=
"table"><a name=
"t4"></a><p class=
"title"><b>Tabell
11.3.
</b></p><div class=
"table-contents"><table summary=
"" border=
"1"><colgroup><col><col><col></colgroup><thead><tr><th align=
"char"> </th><th align=
"char">Kopier
</th><th align=
"char">TRANSFORM
</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td align=
"char">Kommersiell
</td><td align=
"char">©
</td><td align=
"char">©
</td></tr><tr><td align=
"char">Ikke-kommersiell
</td><td align=
"char">©/Fri
</td><td align=
"char">Fri
</td></tr></tbody></table></div></div><br class=
"table-break"><p>
6255 The law was interpreted to reach noncommercial copying through, say, copy
6256 machines, but still much of copying outside of the commercial market
6257 remained free. But the consequence of the emergence of digital technologies,
6258 especially in the context of a digital network, means that the law now looks
6260 </p><div class=
"table"><a name=
"t5"></a><p class=
"title"><b>Tabell
11.4.
</b></p><div class=
"table-contents"><table summary=
"" border=
"1"><colgroup><col><col><col></colgroup><thead><tr><th align=
"char"> </th><th align=
"char">Kopier
</th><th align=
"char">TRANSFORM
</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td align=
"char">Kommersiell
</td><td align=
"char">©
</td><td align=
"char">©
</td></tr><tr><td align=
"char">Ikke-kommersiell
</td><td align=
"char">©
</td><td align=
"char">©
</td></tr></tbody></table></div></div><br class=
"table-break"><p>
6262 Every realm is governed by copyright law, whereas before most creativity was
6263 not. The law now regulates the full range of creativity
— commercial or
6264 not, transformative or not
—with the same rules designed to regulate
6265 commercial publishers.
6267 Obviously, copyright law is not the enemy. The enemy is regulation that does
6268 no good. So the question that we should be asking just now is whether
6269 extending the regulations of copyright law into each of these domains
6270 actually does any good.
6272 I have no doubt that it does good in regulating commercial copying. But I
6273 also have no doubt that it does more harm than good when regulating (as it
6274 regulates just now) noncommercial copying and, especially, noncommercial
6275 transformation. And increasingly, for the reasons sketched especially in
6276 chapters
7 and
8, one might well wonder whether it does more harm than good
6277 for commercial transformation. More commercial transformative work would be
6278 created if derivative rights were more sharply restricted.
6280 The issue is therefore not simply whether copyright is property. Of course
6281 copyright is a kind of "property," and of course, as with any property, the
6282 state ought to protect it. But first impressions notwithstanding,
6283 historically, this property right (as with all property rights
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2595734" href=
"#ftn.id2595734" class=
"footnote">153</a>]
</sup>) has been crafted to balance the important need to
6284 give authors and artists incentives with the equally important need to
6285 assure access to creative work. This balance has always been struck in light
6286 of new technologies. And for almost half of our tradition, the "copyright"
6287 did not control
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>at all
</em></span> the freedom of others to build
6288 upon or transform a creative work. American culture was born free, and for
6289 almost
180 years our country consistently protected a vibrant and rich free
6293 We achieved that free culture because our law respected important limits on
6294 the scope of the interests protected by "property." The very birth of
6295 "copyright" as a statutory right recognized those limits, by granting
6296 copyright owners protection for a limited time only (the story of chapter
6297 6). The tradition of "fair use" is animated by a similar concern that is
6298 increasingly under strain as the costs of exercising any fair use right
6299 become unavoidably high (the story of chapter
7). Adding statutory rights
6300 where markets might stifle innovation is another familiar limit on the
6301 property right that copyright is (chapter
8). And granting archives and
6302 libraries a broad freedom to collect, claims of property notwithstanding, is
6303 a crucial part of guaranteeing the soul of a culture (chapter
9). Free
6304 cultures, like free markets, are built with property. But the nature of the
6305 property that builds a free culture is very different from the extremist
6306 vision that dominates the debate today.
6308 Free culture is increasingly the casualty in this war on piracy. In response
6309 to a real, if not yet quantified, threat that the technologies of the
6310 Internet present to twentieth-century business models for producing and
6311 distributing culture, the law and technology are being transformed in a way
6312 that will undermine our tradition of free culture. The property right that
6313 is copyright is no longer the balanced right that it was, or was intended to
6314 be. The property right that is copyright has become unbalanced, tilted
6315 toward an extreme. The opportunity to create and transform becomes weakened
6316 in a world in which creation requires permission and creativity must check
6318 </p></div><div class=
"footnotes"><br><hr width=
"100" align=
"left"><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2591424" href=
"#id2591424" class=
"para">118</a>]
</sup>
6321 Home Recording of Copyrighted Works: Hearings on H.R.
4783, H.R.
4794,
6322 H.R.
4808, H.R.
5250, H.R.
5488, and H.R.
5705 Before the Subcommittee on
6323 Courts, Civil Liberties, and the Administration of Justice of the Committee
6324 on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives,
97th Cong.,
2nd
6325 sess. (
1982):
65 (testimony of Jack Valenti).
6326 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2591476" href=
"#id2591476" class=
"para">119</a>]
</sup>
6329 Lawyers speak of "property" not as an absolute thing, but as a bundle of
6330 rights that are sometimes associated with a particular object. Thus, my
6331 "property right" to my car gives me the right to exclusive use, but not the
6332 right to drive at
150 miles an hour. For the best effort to connect the
6333 ordinary meaning of "property" to "lawyer talk," see Bruce Ackerman,
6334 <em class=
"citetitle">Private Property and the Constitution
</em> (New Haven:
6335 Yale University Press,
1977),
26–27.
6336 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2591803" href=
"#id2591803" class=
"para">120</a>]
</sup>
6339 By describing the way law affects the other three modalities, I don't mean
6340 to suggest that the other three don't affect law. Obviously, they do. Law's
6341 only distinction is that it alone speaks as if it has a right
6342 self-consciously to change the other three. The right of the other three is
6343 more timidly expressed. See Lawrence Lessig,
<em class=
"citetitle">Code: And Other
6344 Laws of Cyberspace
</em> (New York: Basic Books,
1999):
90–95;
6345 Lawrence Lessig, "The New Chicago School,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Journal of Legal
6346 Studies
</em>, June
1998.
6347 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2591868" href=
"#id2591868" class=
"para">121</a>]
</sup>
6349 Some people object to this way of talking about "liberty." They object
6350 because their focus when considering the constraints that exist at any
6351 particular moment are constraints imposed exclusively by the government. For
6352 instance, if a storm destroys a bridge, these people think it is meaningless
6353 to say that one's liberty has been restrained. A bridge has washed out, and
6354 it's harder to get from one place to another. To talk about this as a loss
6355 of freedom, they say, is to confuse the stuff of politics with the vagaries
6356 of ordinary life. I don't mean to deny the value in this narrower view,
6357 which depends upon the context of the inquiry. I do, however, mean to argue
6358 against any insistence that this narrower view is the only proper view of
6359 liberty. As I argued in
<em class=
"citetitle">Code
</em>, we come from a long
6360 tradition of political thought with a broader focus than the narrow question
6361 of what the government did when. John Stuart Mill defended freedom of
6362 speech, for example, from the tyranny of narrow minds, not from the fear of
6363 government prosecution; John Stuart Mill,
<em class=
"citetitle">On Liberty
</em>
6364 (Indiana: Hackett Publishing Co.,
1978),
19. John R. Commons famously
6365 defended the economic freedom of labor from constraints imposed by the
6366 market; John R. Commons, "The Right to Work," in Malcom Rutherford and
6367 Warren J. Samuels, eds.,
<em class=
"citetitle">John R. Commons: Selected
6368 Essays
</em> (London: Routledge:
1997),
62. The Americans with
6369 Disabilities Act increases the liberty of people with physical disabilities
6370 by changing the architecture of certain public places, thereby making access
6371 to those places easier;
42 <em class=
"citetitle">United States Code
</em>,
6372 section
12101 (
2000). Each of these interventions to change existing
6373 conditions changes the liberty of a particular group. The effect of those
6374 interventions should be accounted for in order to understand the effective
6375 liberty that each of these groups might face.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2591916"></a>
6376 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2592065" href=
"#id2592065" class=
"para">122</a>]
</sup>
6379 See Geoffrey Smith, "Film vs. Digital: Can Kodak Build a Bridge?"
6380 BusinessWeek online,
2 August
1999, available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
23</a>. For a more recent
6381 analysis of Kodak's place in the market, see Chana R. Schoenberger, "Can
6382 Kodak Make Up for Lost Moments?" Forbes.com,
6 October
2003, available at
6383 <a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
24</a>.
6384 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2592115" href=
"#id2592115" class=
"para">123</a>]
</sup>
6387 Fred Warshofsky,
<em class=
"citetitle">The Patent Wars
</em> (New York: Wiley,
6388 1994),
170–71.
6389 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2592281" href=
"#id2592281" class=
"para">124</a>]
</sup>
6392 See, for example, James Boyle, "A Politics of Intellectual Property:
6393 Environmentalism for the Net?"
<em class=
"citetitle">Duke Law Journal
</em> 47
6395 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2592477" href=
"#id2592477" class=
"para">125</a>]
</sup>
6397 William W. Crosskey,
<em class=
"citetitle">Politics and the Constitution in the History
6398 of the United States
</em> (London: Cambridge University Press,
1953),
6399 vol.
1,
485–86: "extinguish[ing], by plain implication of `the supreme
6400 Law of the Land,'
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>the perpetual rights which authors had, or were
6401 supposed by some to have, under the Common Law
</em></span>" (emphasis
6402 added). <a class="indexterm
" name="id2592493
"></a>
6403 </p></div><div class="footnote
"><p><sup>[<a name="ftn.id2592543
" href="#id2592543
" class="para
">126</a>] </sup>
6406 Although 13,000 titles were published in the United States from 1790 to
6407 1799, only 556 copyright registrations were filed; John Tebbel, <em class="citetitle
">A
6408 History of Book Publishing in the United States</em>, vol. 1,
6409 <em class="citetitle
">The Creation of an Industry, 1630–1865</em> (New
6410 York: Bowker, 1972), 141. Of the 21,000 imprints recorded before 1790, only
6411 twelve were copyrighted under the 1790 act; William J. Maher,
6412 <em class="citetitle
">Copyright Term, Retrospective Extension and the Copyright Law of
6413 1790 in Historical Context</em>, 7–10 (2002), available at
6414 <a class="ulink
" href="http://free-culture.cc/notes/
" target="_top
">link #25</a>. Thus, the
6415 overwhelming majority of works fell immediately into the public domain. Even
6416 those works that were copyrighted fell into the public domain quickly,
6417 because the term of copyright was short. The initial term of copyright was
6418 fourteen years, with the option of renewal for an additional fourteen
6419 years. Copyright Act of May 31, 1790, §1, 1 stat. 124. </p></div><div class="footnote
"><p><sup>[<a name="ftn.id2592609
" href="#id2592609
" class="para
">127</a>] </sup>
6422 Few copyright holders ever chose to renew their copyrights. For instance, of
6423 the 25,006 copyrights registered in 1883, only 894 were renewed in 1910. For
6424 a year-by-year analysis of copyright renewal rates, see Barbara A. Ringer,
6425 "Study No.
31: Renewal of Copyright,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Studies on
6426 Copyright
</em>, vol.
1 (New York: Practicing Law Institute,
1963),
6427 618. For a more recent and comprehensive analysis, see William M. Landes and
6428 Richard A. Posner, "Indefinitely Renewable Copyright,"
6429 <em class=
"citetitle">University of Chicago Law Review
</em> 70 (
2003):
471,
6430 498–501, and accompanying figures.
</p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2592638" href=
"#id2592638" class=
"para">128</a>]
</sup>
6433 Se Ringer, kap.
9, n.
2.
</p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2592733" href=
"#id2592733" class=
"para">129</a>]
</sup>
6436 These statistics are understated. Between the years
1910 and
1962 (the first
6437 year the renewal term was extended), the average term was never more than
6438 thirty-two years, and averaged thirty years. See Landes and Posner,
6439 "Indefinitely Renewable Copyright," loc. cit.
6440 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2592857" href=
"#id2592857" class=
"para">130</a>]
</sup>
6443 See Thomas Bender and David Sampliner, "Poets, Pirates, and the Creation of
6444 American Literature,"
29 <em class=
"citetitle">New York University Journal of
6445 International Law and Politics
</em> 255 (
1997), and James Gilraeth,
6446 ed., Federal Copyright Records,
1790–1800 (U.S. G.P.O.,
1987).
6448 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2592938" href=
"#id2592938" class=
"para">131</a>]
</sup>
6450 Jonathan Zittrain, "The Copyright Cage,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Legal
6451 Affairs
</em>, July/August
2003, available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
26</a>.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2592966"></a>
6452 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2592985" href=
"#id2592985" class=
"para">132</a>]
</sup>
6455 Professor Rubenfeld has presented a powerful constitutional argument about
6456 the difference that copyright law should draw (from the perspective of the
6457 First Amendment) between mere "copies" and derivative works. See Jed
6458 Rubenfeld, "The Freedom of Imagination: Copyright's Constitutionality,"
6459 <em class=
"citetitle">Yale Law Journal
</em> 112 (
2002):
1–60 (see
6460 especially pp.
53–59).
6461 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2593035" href=
"#id2593035" class=
"para">133</a>]
</sup>
6464 This is a simplification of the law, but not much of one. The law certainly
6465 regulates more than "copies"
—a public performance of a copyrighted
6466 song, for example, is regulated even though performance per se doesn't make
6467 a copy;
17 <em class=
"citetitle">United States Code
</em>, section
106(
4). And it
6468 certainly sometimes doesn't regulate a "copy";
17 <em class=
"citetitle">United States
6469 Code
</em>, section
112(a). But the presumption under the existing law
6470 (which regulates "copies;"
17 <em class=
"citetitle">United States Code
</em>,
6471 section
102) is that if there is a copy, there is a right.
6472 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2593096" href=
"#id2593096" class=
"para">134</a>]
</sup>
6475 Thus, my argument is not that in each place that copyright law extends, we
6476 should repeal it. It is instead that we should have a good argument for its
6477 extending where it does, and should not determine its reach on the basis of
6478 arbitrary and automatic changes caused by technology.
6479 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2593042" href=
"#id2593042" class=
"para">135</a>]
</sup>
6482 I don't mean "nature" in the sense that it couldn't be different, but rather
6483 that its present instantiation entails a copy. Optical networks need not
6484 make copies of content they transmit, and a digital network could be
6485 designed to delete anything it copies so that the same number of copies
6487 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2593568" href=
"#id2593568" class=
"para">136</a>]
</sup>
6490 See David Lange, "Recognizing the Public Domain,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Law and
6491 Contemporary Problems
</em> 44 (
1981):
172–73.
6492 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2593589" href=
"#id2593589" class=
"para">137</a>]
</sup>
6494 Ibid. Se også Vaidhyanathan,
<em class=
"citetitle">Copyrights and
6495 Copywrongs
</em>,
1–3.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2593579"></a>
6496 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2593830" href=
"#id2593830" class=
"para">138</a>]
</sup>
6499 In principle, a contract might impose a requirement on me. I might, for
6500 example, buy a book from you that includes a contract that says I will read
6501 it only three times, or that I promise to read it three times. But that
6502 obligation (and the limits for creating that obligation) would come from the
6503 contract, not from copyright law, and the obligations of contract would not
6504 necessarily pass to anyone who subsequently acquired the book.
6505 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2594139" href=
"#id2594139" class=
"para">139</a>]
</sup>
6507 See Pamela Samuelson, "Anticircumvention Rules: Threat to Science,"
6508 <em class=
"citetitle">Science
</em> 293 (
2001):
2028; Brendan I. Koerner,
"Play
6509 Dead: Sony Muzzles the Techies Who Teach a Robot Dog New Tricks,"
6510 <em class=
"citetitle">American Prospect
</em>, January
2002; "Court Dismisses
6511 Computer Scientists' Challenge to DMCA,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Intellectual Property
6512 Litigation Reporter
</em>,
11 December
2001; Bill Holland, "Copyright
6513 Act Raising Free-Speech Concerns,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Billboard
</em>, May
6514 2001; Janelle Brown, "Is the RIAA Running Scared?" Salon.com, April
2001;
6515 Electronic Frontier Foundation, "Frequently Asked Questions about
6516 <em class=
"citetitle">Felten and USENIX
</em> v.
<em class=
"citetitle">RIAA
</em>
6517 Legal Case," available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link
6518 #
27</a>.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2594177"></a>
6519 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2594402" href=
"#id2594402" class=
"para">140</a>]
</sup>
6522 <em class=
"citetitle">Sony Corporation of America
</em> v.
<em class=
"citetitle">Universal
6523 City Studios, Inc
</em>.,
464 U.S.
417,
455 fn.
27 (
1984). Rogers
6524 never changed his view about the VCR. See James Lardner,
<em class=
"citetitle">Fast
6525 Forward: Hollywood, the Japanese, and the Onslaught of the VCR
</em>
6526 (New York: W. W. Norton,
1987),
270–71.
6527 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2594552" href=
"#id2594552" class=
"para">141</a>]
</sup>
6530 For an early and prescient analysis, see Rebecca Tushnet, "Legal Fictions,
6531 Copyright, Fan Fiction, and a New Common Law,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Loyola of Los
6532 Angeles Entertainment Law Journal
</em> 17 (
1997):
651.
6533 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2594676" href=
"#id2594676" class=
"para">142</a>]
</sup>
6536 FCC Oversight: Hearing Before the Senate Commerce, Science and
6537 Transportation Committee,
108th Cong.,
1st sess. (
22 May
2003) (statement
6538 of Senator John McCain).
</p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2594688" href=
"#id2594688" class=
"para">143</a>]
</sup>
6541 Lynette Holloway, "Despite a Marketing Blitz, CD Sales Continue to Slide,"
6542 <em class=
"citetitle">New York Times
</em>,
23 December
2002.
6543 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2594701" href=
"#id2594701" class=
"para">144</a>]
</sup>
6546 Molly Ivins, "Media Consolidation Must Be Stopped,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Charleston
6547 Gazette
</em>,
31 May
2003.
6548 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2594768" href=
"#id2594768" class=
"para">145</a>]
</sup>
6550 James Fallows, "The Age of Murdoch,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Atlantic Monthly
</em>
6551 (September
2003):
89.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2594784"></a>
6552 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2594894" href=
"#id2594894" class=
"para">146</a>]
</sup>
6555 Leonard Hill, "The Axis of Access," remarks before Weidenbaum Center Forum,
6556 "Entertainment Economics: The Movie Industry," St. Louis, Missouri,
3 April
6557 2003 (transcript of prepared remarks available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
28</a>; for the Lear story,
6558 not included in the prepared remarks, see
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
29</a>).
6559 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2594924" href=
"#id2594924" class=
"para">147</a>]
</sup>
6562 NewsCorp./DirecTV Merger and Media Consolidation: Hearings on Media
6563 Ownership Before the Senate Commerce Committee,
108th Cong.,
1st
6564 sess. (
2003) (testimony of Gene Kimmelman on behalf of Consumers Union and
6565 the Consumer Federation of America), available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
30</a>. Kimmelman quotes
6566 Victoria Riskin, president of Writers Guild of America, West, in her Remarks
6567 at FCC En Banc Hearing, Richmond, Virginia,
27 February
2003.
6568 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2594967" href=
"#id2594967" class=
"para">148</a>]
</sup>
6572 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2595021" href=
"#id2595021" class=
"para">149</a>]
</sup>
6575 "Barry Diller Takes on Media Deregulation,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Now with Bill
6576 Moyers
</em>, Bill Moyers,
25 April
2003, edited transcript available
6577 at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
31</a>.
6578 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2595073" href=
"#id2595073" class=
"para">150</a>]
</sup>
6581 Clayton M. Christensen,
<em class=
"citetitle">The Innovator's Dilemma: The
6582 Revolutionary National Bestseller that Changed the Way We Do
6583 Business
</em> (Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press,
6584 1997). Christensen acknowledges that the idea was first suggested by Dean
6585 Kim Clark. See Kim B. Clark, "The Interaction of Design Hierarchies and
6586 Market Concepts in Technological Evolution,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Research
6587 Policy
</em> 14 (
1985):
235–51. For a more recent study, see
6588 Richard Foster and Sarah Kaplan,
<em class=
"citetitle">Creative Destruction: Why
6589 Companies That Are Built to Last Underperform the Market
—and How to
6590 Successfully Transform Them
</em> (New York: Currency/Doubleday,
6591 2001).
</p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2595204" href=
"#id2595204" class=
"para">151</a>]
</sup>
6593 The Marijuana Policy Project, in February
2003, sought to place ads that
6594 directly responded to the Nick and Norm series on stations within the
6595 Washington, D.C., area. Comcast rejected the ads as "against [their]
6596 policy." The local NBC affiliate, WRC, rejected the ads without reviewing
6597 them. The local ABC affiliate, WJOA, originally agreed to run the ads and
6598 accepted payment to do so, but later decided not to run the ads and returned
6599 the collected fees. Interview with Neal Levine,
15 October
2003. These
6600 restrictions are, of course, not limited to drug policy. See, for example,
6601 Nat Ives, "On the Issue of an Iraq War, Advocacy Ads Meet with Rejection
6602 from TV Networks,"
<em class=
"citetitle">New York Times
</em>,
13 March
2003,
6603 C4. Outside of election-related air time there is very little that the FCC
6604 or the courts are willing to do to even the playing field. For a general
6605 overview, see Rhonda Brown, "Ad Hoc Access: The Regulation of Editorial
6606 Advertising on Television and Radio,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Yale Law and Policy
6607 Review
</em> 6 (
1988):
449–79, and for a more recent summary of
6608 the stance of the FCC and the courts, see
<em class=
"citetitle">Radio-Television News
6609 Directors Association
</em> v.
<em class=
"citetitle">FCC
</em>,
184 F.
3d
6610 872 (D.C. Cir.
1999). Municipal authorities exercise the same authority as
6611 the networks. In a recent example from San Francisco, the San Francisco
6612 transit authority rejected an ad that criticized its Muni diesel
6613 buses. Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross, "Antidiesel Group Fuming After Muni
6614 Rejects Ad," SFGate.com,
16 June
2003, available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
32</a>. The ground was that
6615 the criticism was "too controversial."
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2595252"></a> <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2595260"></a> <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2595266"></a>
6616 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2595389" href=
"#id2595389" class=
"para">152</a>]
</sup>
6618 Siva Vaidhyanathan fanger et lignende poeng i hans "fire kapitulasjoner" for
6619 opphavsrettsloven i den digitale tidsalder. Se Vaidhyanathan,
159–60.
6620 <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2595230"></a>
6621 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2595734" href=
"#id2595734" class=
"para">153</a>]
</sup>
6624 It was the single most important contribution of the legal realist movement
6625 to demonstrate that all property rights are always crafted to balance public
6626 and private interests. See Thomas C. Grey, "The Disintegration of Property,"
6627 in
<em class=
"citetitle">Nomos XXII: Property
</em>, J. Roland Pennock and John
6628 W. Chapman, eds. (New York: New York University Press,
1980).
6629 </p></div></div></div></div><div class=
"part" title=
"Del III. Nøtter"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h1 class=
"title"><a name=
"c-puzzles"></a>Del III. Nøtter
</h1></div></div></div><div class=
"toc"><p><b>Innholdsfortegnelse
</b></p><dl><dt><span class=
"chapter"><a href=
"#chimera">12. Kapittel elleve: Chimera
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"chapter"><a href=
"#harms">13. Kapittel tolv: Skader
</a></span></dt><dd><dl><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#constrain">Constraining Creators
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#innovators">Constraining Innovators
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#corruptingcitizens">Corrupting Citizens
</a></span></dt></dl></dd></dl></div><div class=
"chapter" title=
"Kapittel 12. Kapittel elleve: Chimera"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h2 class=
"title"><a name=
"chimera"></a>Kapittel
12. Kapittel elleve: Chimera
</h2></div></div></div><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"idxchimera"></a><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"idxwells"></a><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"idxtcotb"></a><p>
6630 In a well-known short story by H. G. Wells, a mountain climber named Nunez
6631 trips (literally, down an ice slope) into an unknown and isolated valley in
6632 the Peruvian Andes.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2595881" href=
"#ftn.id2595881" class=
"footnote">154</a>]
</sup> The valley is
6633 extraordinarily beautiful, with "sweet water, pasture, an even climate,
6634 slopes of rich brown soil with tangles of a shrub that bore an excellent
6635 fruit." But the villagers are all blind. Nunez takes this as an
6636 opportunity. "In the Country of the Blind," he tells himself, "the One-Eyed
6637 Man is King." So he resolves to live with the villagers to explore life as a
6640 Things don't go quite as he planned. He tries to explain the idea of sight
6641 to the villagers. They don't understand. He tells them they are "blind."
6642 They don't have the word
<em class=
"citetitle">blind
</em>. They think he's just
6643 thick. Indeed, as they increasingly notice the things he can't do (hear the
6644 sound of grass being stepped on, for example), they increasingly try to
6645 control him. He, in turn, becomes increasingly frustrated. "`You don't
6646 understand,' he cried, in a voice that was meant to be great and resolute,
6647 and which broke. `You are blind and I can see. Leave me alone!'"
6651 The villagers don't leave him alone. Nor do they see (so to speak) the
6652 virtue of his special power. Not even the ultimate target of his affection,
6653 a young woman who to him seems "the most beautiful thing in the whole of
6654 creation," understands the beauty of sight. Nunez's description of what he
6655 sees "seemed to her the most poetical of fancies, and she listened to his
6656 description of the stars and the mountains and her own sweet white-lit
6657 beauty as though it was a guilty indulgence." "She did not believe," Wells
6658 tells us, and "she could only half understand, but she was mysteriously
6661 When Nunez announces his desire to marry his "mysteriously delighted" love,
6662 the father and the village object. "You see, my dear," her father instructs,
6663 "he's an idiot. He has delusions. He can't do anything right." They take
6664 Nunez to the village doctor.
6666 After a careful examination, the doctor gives his opinion. "His brain is
6667 affected," he reports.
6669 "What affects it?" the father asks. "Those queer things that are called the
6670 eyes . . . are diseased . . . in such a way as to affect his brain."
6672 The doctor continues: "I think I may say with reasonable certainty that in
6673 order to cure him completely, all that we need to do is a simple and easy
6674 surgical operation
—namely, to remove these irritant bodies [the
6678 "Thank Heaven for science!" says the father to the doctor. They inform Nunez
6679 of this condition necessary for him to be allowed his bride. (You'll have
6680 to read the original to learn what happens in the end. I believe in free
6681 culture, but never in giving away the end of a story.) It sometimes happens
6682 that the eggs of twins fuse in the mother's womb. That fusion produces a
6683 "chimera." A chimera is a single creature with two sets of DNA. The DNA in
6684 the blood, for example, might be different from the DNA of the skin. This
6685 possibility is an underused plot for murder mysteries. "But the DNA shows
6686 with
100 percent certainty that she was not the person whose blood was at
6688 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2595976"></a><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2595984"></a><p>
6689 Before I had read about chimeras, I would have said they were impossible. A
6690 single person can't have two sets of DNA. The very idea of DNA is that it is
6691 the code of an individual. Yet in fact, not only can two individuals have
6692 the same set of DNA (identical twins), but one person can have two different
6693 sets of DNA (a chimera). Our understanding of a "person" should reflect this
6696 The more I work to understand the current struggle over copyright and
6697 culture, which I've sometimes called unfairly, and sometimes not unfairly
6698 enough, "the copyright wars," the more I think we're dealing with a
6699 chimera. For example, in the battle over the question "What is p2p file
6700 sharing?" both sides have it right, and both sides have it wrong. One side
6701 says, "File sharing is just like two kids taping each others'
6702 records
—the sort of thing we've been doing for the last thirty years
6703 without any question at all." That's true, at least in part. When I tell my
6704 best friend to try out a new CD that I've bought, but rather than just send
6705 the CD, I point him to my p2p server, that is, in all relevant respects,
6706 just like what every executive in every recording company no doubt did as a
6709 But the description is also false in part. For when my p2p server is on a
6710 p2p network through which anyone can get access to my music, then sure, my
6711 friends can get access, but it stretches the meaning of "friends" beyond
6712 recognition to say "my ten thousand best friends" can get access. Whether or
6713 not sharing my music with my best friend is what "we have always been
6714 allowed to do," we have not always been allowed to share music with "our ten
6715 thousand best friends."
6717 Likewise, when the other side says, "File sharing is just like walking into
6718 a Tower Records and taking a CD off the shelf and walking out with it,"
6719 that's true, at least in part. If, after Lyle Lovett (finally) releases a
6720 new album, rather than buying it, I go to Kazaa and find a free copy to
6721 take, that is very much like stealing a copy from Tower.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2596010"></a>
6726 But it is not quite stealing from Tower. After all, when I take a CD from
6727 Tower Records, Tower has one less CD to sell. And when I take a CD from
6728 Tower Records, I get a bit of plastic and a cover, and something to show on
6729 my shelves. (And, while we're at it, we could also note that when I take a
6730 CD from Tower Records, the maximum fine that might be imposed on me, under
6731 California law, at least, is $
1,
000. According to the RIAA, by contrast, if
6732 I download a ten-song CD, I'm liable for $
1,
500,
000 in damages.)
6734 The point is not that it is as neither side describes. The point is that it
6735 is both
—both as the RIAA describes it and as Kazaa describes it. It is
6736 a chimera. And rather than simply denying what the other side asserts, we
6737 need to begin to think about how we should respond to this chimera. What
6738 rules should govern it?
6740 We could respond by simply pretending that it is not a chimera. We could,
6741 with the RIAA, decide that every act of file sharing should be a felony. We
6742 could prosecute families for millions of dollars in damages just because
6743 file sharing occurred on a family computer. And we can get universities to
6744 monitor all computer traffic to make sure that no computer is used to commit
6745 this crime. These responses might be extreme, but each of them has either
6746 been proposed or actually implemented.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2596079" href=
"#ftn.id2596079" class=
"footnote">155</a>]
</sup>
6748 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2596157"></a><p>
6749 Alternatively, we could respond to file sharing the way many kids act as
6750 though we've responded. We could totally legalize it. Let there be no
6751 copyright liability, either civil or criminal, for making copyrighted
6752 content available on the Net. Make file sharing like gossip: regulated, if
6753 at all, by social norms but not by law.
6755 Either response is possible. I think either would be a mistake. Rather than
6756 embrace one of these two extremes, we should embrace something that
6757 recognizes the truth in both. And while I end this book with a sketch of a
6758 system that does just that, my aim in the next chapter is to show just how
6759 awful it would be for us to adopt the zero-tolerance extreme. I believe
6760 <span class=
"emphasis"><em>either
</em></span> extreme would be worse than a reasonable
6761 alternative. But I believe the zero-tolerance solution would be the worse
6762 of the two extremes.
6767 Yet zero tolerance is increasingly our government's policy. In the middle of
6768 the chaos that the Internet has created, an extraordinary land grab is
6769 occurring. The law and technology are being shifted to give content holders
6770 a kind of control over our culture that they have never had before. And in
6771 this extremism, many an opportunity for new innovation and new creativity
6774 I'm not talking about the opportunities for kids to "steal" music. My focus
6775 instead is the commercial and cultural innovation that this war will also
6776 kill. We have never seen the power to innovate spread so broadly among our
6777 citizens, and we have just begun to see the innovation that this power will
6778 unleash. Yet the Internet has already seen the passing of one cycle of
6779 innovation around technologies to distribute content. The law is responsible
6780 for this passing. As the vice president for global public policy at one of
6781 these new innovators, eMusic.com, put it when criticizing the DMCA's added
6782 protection for copyrighted material,
6783 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
6784 eMusic opposes music piracy. We are a distributor of copyrighted material,
6785 and we want to protect those rights.
6787 But building a technology fortress that locks in the clout of the major
6788 labels is by no means the only way to protect copyright interests, nor is it
6789 necessarily the best. It is simply too early to answer that question. Market
6790 forces operating naturally may very well produce a totally different
6793 This is a critical point. The choices that industry sectors make with
6794 respect to these systems will in many ways directly shape the market for
6795 digital media and the manner in which digital media are distributed. This in
6796 turn will directly influence the options that are available to consumers,
6797 both in terms of the ease with which they will be able to access digital
6798 media and the equipment that they will require to do so. Poor choices made
6799 this early in the game will retard the growth of this market, hurting
6800 everyone's interests.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2596249" href=
"#ftn.id2596249" class=
"footnote">156</a>]
</sup>
6801 </p></blockquote></div><p>
6802 In April
2001, eMusic.com was purchased by Vivendi Universal, one of "the
6803 major labels." Its position on these matters has now changed.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2596271"></a>
6805 Reversing our tradition of tolerance now will not merely quash piracy. It
6806 will sacrifice values that are important to this culture, and will kill
6807 opportunities that could be extraordinarily valuable.
6808 </p><div class=
"footnotes"><br><hr width=
"100" align=
"left"><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2595881" href=
"#id2595881" class=
"para">154</a>]
</sup>
6811 H. G. Wells, "The Country of the Blind" (
1904,
1911). See H. G. Wells,
6812 <em class=
"citetitle">The Country of the Blind and Other Stories
</em>, Michael
6813 Sherborne, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press,
1996).
6814 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2596079" href=
"#id2596079" class=
"para">155</a>]
</sup>
6816 For an excellent summary, see the report prepared by GartnerG2 and the
6817 Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, "Copyright
6818 and Digital Media in a Post-Napster World,"
27 June
2003, available at
6819 <a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
33</a>. Reps. John
6820 Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) and Howard L. Berman (D-Calif.) have introduced a bill
6821 that would treat unauthorized on-line copying as a felony offense with
6822 punishments ranging as high as five years imprisonment; see Jon Healey,
6823 "House Bill Aims to Up Stakes on Piracy,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Los Angeles
6824 Times
</em>,
17 July
2003, available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
34</a>. Civil penalties are
6825 currently set at $
150,
000 per copied song. For a recent (and unsuccessful)
6826 legal challenge to the RIAA's demand that an ISP reveal the identity of a
6827 user accused of sharing more than
600 songs through a family computer, see
6828 <em class=
"citetitle">RIAA
</em> v.
<em class=
"citetitle">Verizon Internet Services (In
6829 re. Verizon Internet Services)
</em>,
240 F. Supp.
2d
24
6830 (D.D.C.
2003). Such a user could face liability ranging as high as $
90
6831 million. Such astronomical figures furnish the RIAA with a powerful arsenal
6832 in its prosecution of file sharers. Settlements ranging from $
12,
000 to
6833 $
17,
500 for four students accused of heavy file sharing on university
6834 networks must have seemed a mere pittance next to the $
98 billion the RIAA
6835 could seek should the matter proceed to court. See Elizabeth Young,
6836 "Downloading Could Lead to Fines," redandblack.com, August
2003, available
6837 at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
35</a>. For an
6838 example of the RIAA's targeting of student file sharing, and of the
6839 subpoenas issued to universities to reveal student file-sharer identities,
6840 see James Collins, "RIAA Steps Up Bid to Force BC, MIT to Name Students,"
6841 <em class=
"citetitle">Boston Globe
</em>,
8 August
2003, D3, available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
36</a>.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2596147"></a>
6842 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2596249" href=
"#id2596249" class=
"para">156</a>]
</sup>
6845 WIPO and the DMCA One Year Later: Assessing Consumer Access to Digital
6846 Entertainment on the Internet and Other Media: Hearing Before the
6847 Subcommittee on Telecommunications, Trade, and Consumer Protection, House
6848 Committee on Commerce,
106th Cong.
29 (
1999) (statement of Peter Harter,
6849 vice president, Global Public Policy and Standards, EMusic.com), available
6850 in LEXIS, Federal Document Clearing House Congressional Testimony File.
</p></div></div></div><div class=
"chapter" title=
"Kapittel 13. Kapittel tolv: Skader"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h2 class=
"title"><a name=
"harms"></a>Kapittel
13. Kapittel tolv: Skader
</h2></div></div></div><div class=
"toc"><p><b>Innholdsfortegnelse
</b></p><dl><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#constrain">Constraining Creators
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#innovators">Constraining Innovators
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"section"><a href=
"#corruptingcitizens">Corrupting Citizens
</a></span></dt></dl></div><p>
6852 To fight "piracy," to protect "property," the content industry has launched
6853 a war. Lobbying and lots of campaign contributions have now brought the
6854 government into this war. As with any war, this one will have both direct
6855 and collateral damage. As with any war of prohibition, these damages will be
6856 suffered most by our own people.
6858 My aim so far has been to describe the consequences of this war, in
6859 particular, the consequences for "free culture." But my aim now is to extend
6860 this description of consequences into an argument. Is this war justified?
6862 In my view, it is not. There is no good reason why this time, for the first
6863 time, the law should defend the old against the new, just when the power of
6864 the property called "intellectual property" is at its greatest in our
6866 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2596319"></a><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2596325"></a><p>
6867 Yet "common sense" does not see it this way. Common sense is still on the
6868 side of the Causbys and the content industry. The extreme claims of control
6869 in the name of property still resonate; the uncritical rejection of "piracy"
6874 There will be many consequences of continuing this war. I want to describe
6875 just three. All three might be said to be unintended. I am quite confident
6876 the third is unintended. I'm less sure about the first two. The first two
6877 protect modern RCAs, but there is no Howard Armstrong in the wings to fight
6878 today's monopolists of culture.
6879 </p><div class=
"section" title=
"Constraining Creators"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h2 class=
"title" style=
"clear: both"><a name=
"constrain"></a>Constraining Creators
</h2></div></div></div><p>
6880 In the next ten years we will see an explosion of digital technologies.
6881 These technologies will enable almost anyone to capture and share
6882 content. Capturing and sharing content, of course, is what humans have done
6883 since the dawn of man. It is how we learn and communicate. But capturing and
6884 sharing through digital technology is different. The fidelity and power are
6885 different. You could send an e-mail telling someone about a joke you saw on
6886 Comedy Central, or you could send the clip. You could write an essay about
6887 the inconsistencies in the arguments of the politician you most love to
6888 hate, or you could make a short film that puts statement against
6889 statement. You could write a poem to express your love, or you could weave
6890 together a string
—a mash-up
— of songs from your favorite artists
6891 in a collage and make it available on the Net.
6893 This digital "capturing and sharing" is in part an extension of the
6894 capturing and sharing that has always been integral to our culture, and in
6895 part it is something new. It is continuous with the Kodak, but it explodes
6896 the boundaries of Kodak-like technologies. The technology of digital
6897 "capturing and sharing" promises a world of extraordinarily diverse
6898 creativity that can be easily and broadly shared. And as that creativity is
6899 applied to democracy, it will enable a broad range of citizens to use
6900 technology to express and criticize and contribute to the culture all
6904 Teknologien har dermed gitt oss en mulighet til å gjøre noe med kultur som
6905 bare har vært mulig for enkeltpersoner i små grupper, isolert fra andre
6906 grupper. Forestill deg en gammel mann som forteller en historie til en
6907 samling med naboer i en liten landsby. Forestill deg så den samme
6908 historiefortellingen utvidet til å nå over hele verden.
6910 Yet all this is possible only if the activity is presumptively legal. In the
6911 current regime of legal regulation, it is not. Forget file sharing for a
6912 moment. Think about your favorite amazing sites on the Net. Web sites that
6913 offer plot summaries from forgotten television shows; sites that catalog
6914 cartoons from the
1960s; sites that mix images and sound to criticize
6915 politicians or businesses; sites that gather newspaper articles on remote
6916 topics of science or culture. There is a vast amount of creative work spread
6917 across the Internet. But as the law is currently crafted, this work is
6918 presumptively illegal.
6920 That presumption will increasingly chill creativity, as the examples of
6921 extreme penalties for vague infringements continue to proliferate. It is
6922 impossible to get a clear sense of what's allowed and what's not, and at the
6923 same time, the penalties for crossing the line are astonishingly harsh. The
6924 four students who were threatened by the RIAA ( Jesse Jordan of chapter
3
6925 was just one) were threatened with a $
98 billion lawsuit for building search
6926 engines that permitted songs to be copied. Yet World-Com
—which
6927 defrauded investors of $
11 billion, resulting in a loss to investors in
6928 market capitalization of over $
200 billion
—received a fine of a mere
6929 $
750 million.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2596430" href=
"#ftn.id2596430" class=
"footnote">157</a>]
</sup> And under legislation
6930 being pushed in Congress right now, a doctor who negligently removes the
6931 wrong leg in an operation would be liable for no more than $
250,
000 in
6932 damages for pain and suffering.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2596466" href=
"#ftn.id2596466" class=
"footnote">158</a>]
</sup> Can
6933 common sense recognize the absurdity in a world where the maximum fine for
6934 downloading two songs off the Internet is more than the fine for a doctor's
6935 negligently butchering a patient?
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2596503"></a>
6937 The consequence of this legal uncertainty, tied to these extremely high
6938 penalties, is that an extraordinary amount of creativity will either never
6939 be exercised, or never be exercised in the open. We drive this creative
6940 process underground by branding the modern-day Walt Disneys "pirates." We
6941 make it impossible for businesses to rely upon a public domain, because the
6942 boundaries of the public domain are designed to be unclear. It never pays to
6943 do anything except pay for the right to create, and hence only those who can
6944 pay are allowed to create. As was the case in the Soviet Union, though for
6945 very different reasons, we will begin to see a world of underground
6946 art
—not because the message is necessarily political, or because the
6947 subject is controversial, but because the very act of creating the art is
6948 legally fraught. Already, exhibits of "illegal art" tour the United
6949 States.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2596063" href=
"#ftn.id2596063" class=
"footnote">159</a>]
</sup> In what does their "illegality"
6950 consist? In the act of mixing the culture around us with an expression that
6951 is critical or reflective.
6953 Part of the reason for this fear of illegality has to do with the changing
6954 law. I described that change in detail in chapter
10. But an even bigger
6955 part has to do with the increasing ease with which infractions can be
6956 tracked. As users of file-sharing systems discovered in
2002, it is a
6957 trivial matter for copyright owners to get courts to order Internet service
6958 providers to reveal who has what content. It is as if your cassette tape
6959 player transmitted a list of the songs that you played in the privacy of
6960 your own home that anyone could tune into for whatever reason they chose.
6962 Never in our history has a painter had to worry about whether his painting
6963 infringed on someone else's work; but the modern-day painter, using the
6964 tools of Photoshop, sharing content on the Web, must worry all the
6965 time. Images are all around, but the only safe images to use in the act of
6966 creation are those purchased from Corbis or another image farm. And in
6967 purchasing, censoring happens. There is a free market in pencils; we needn't
6968 worry about its effect on creativity. But there is a highly regulated,
6969 monopolized market in cultural icons; the right to cultivate and transform
6970 them is not similarly free.
6972 Lawyers rarely see this because lawyers are rarely empirical. As I described
6973 in chapter
7, in response to the story about documentary filmmaker Jon Else,
6974 I have been lectured again and again by lawyers who insist Else's use was
6975 fair use, and hence I am wrong to say that the law regulates such a use.
6980 But fair use in America simply means the right to hire a lawyer to defend
6981 your right to create. And as lawyers love to forget, our system for
6982 defending rights such as fair use is astonishingly bad
—in practically
6983 every context, but especially here. It costs too much, it delivers too
6984 slowly, and what it delivers often has little connection to the justice
6985 underlying the claim. The legal system may be tolerable for the very rich.
6986 For everyone else, it is an embarrassment to a tradition that prides itself
6989 Judges and lawyers can tell themselves that fair use provides adequate
6990 "breathing room" between regulation by the law and the access the law should
6991 allow. But it is a measure of how out of touch our legal system has become
6992 that anyone actually believes this. The rules that publishers impose upon
6993 writers, the rules that film distributors impose upon filmmakers, the rules
6994 that newspapers impose upon journalists
— these are the real laws
6995 governing creativity. And these rules have little relationship to the "law"
6996 with which judges comfort themselves.
6998 For in a world that threatens $
150,
000 for a single willful infringement of
6999 a copyright, and which demands tens of thousands of dollars to even defend
7000 against a copyright infringement claim, and which would never return to the
7001 wrongfully accused defendant anything of the costs she suffered to defend
7002 her right to speak
—in that world, the astonishingly broad regulations
7003 that pass under the name "copyright" silence speech and creativity. And in
7004 that world, it takes a studied blindness for people to continue to believe
7005 they live in a culture that is free.
7007 As Jed Horovitz, the businessman behind Video Pipeline, said to me,
7008 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
7010 We're losing [creative] opportunities right and left. Creative people are
7011 being forced not to express themselves. Thoughts are not being
7012 expressed. And while a lot of stuff may [still] be created, it still won't
7013 get distributed. Even if the stuff gets made . . . you're not going to get
7014 it distributed in the mainstream media unless you've got a little note from
7015 a lawyer saying, "This has been cleared." You're not even going to get it on
7016 PBS without that kind of permission. That's the point at which they control
7018 </p></blockquote></div></div><div class=
"section" title=
"Constraining Innovators"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h2 class=
"title" style=
"clear: both"><a name=
"innovators"></a>Constraining Innovators
</h2></div></div></div><p>
7019 The story of the last section was a crunchy-lefty story
—creativity
7020 quashed, artists who can't speak, yada yada yada. Maybe that doesn't get you
7021 going. Maybe you think there's enough weird art out there, and enough
7022 expression that is critical of what seems to be just about everything. And
7023 if you think that, you might think there's little in this story to worry
7026 But there's an aspect of this story that is not lefty in any sense. Indeed,
7027 it is an aspect that could be written by the most extreme promarket
7028 ideologue. And if you're one of these sorts (and a special one at that,
188
7029 pages into a book like this), then you can see this other aspect by
7030 substituting "free market" every place I've spoken of "free culture." The
7031 point is the same, even if the interests affecting culture are more
7034 The charge I've been making about the regulation of culture is the same
7035 charge free marketers make about regulating markets. Everyone, of course,
7036 concedes that some regulation of markets is necessary
—at a minimum, we
7037 need rules of property and contract, and courts to enforce both. Likewise,
7038 in this culture debate, everyone concedes that at least some framework of
7039 copyright is also required. But both perspectives vehemently insist that
7040 just because some regulation is good, it doesn't follow that more regulation
7041 is better. And both perspectives are constantly attuned to the ways in which
7042 regulation simply enables the powerful industries of today to protect
7043 themselves against the competitors of tomorrow.
7044 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2596690"></a><p>
7046 This is the single most dramatic effect of the shift in regulatory strategy
7047 that I described in chapter
10. The consequence of this massive threat of
7048 liability tied to the murky boundaries of copyright law is that innovators
7049 who want to innovate in this space can safely innovate only if they have the
7050 sign-off from last generation's dominant industries. That lesson has been
7051 taught through a series of cases that were designed and executed to teach
7052 venture capitalists a lesson. That lesson
—what former Napster CEO Hank
7053 Barry calls a "nuclear pall" that has fallen over the Valley
—has been
7056 Consider one example to make the point, a story whose beginning I told in
7057 <em class=
"citetitle">The Future of Ideas
</em> and which has progressed in a way
7058 that even I (pessimist extraordinaire) would never have predicted.
7060 In
1997, Michael Roberts launched a company called MP3.com. MP3.com was
7061 keen to remake the music business. Their goal was not just to facilitate new
7062 ways to get access to content. Their goal was also to facilitate new ways to
7063 create content. Unlike the major labels, MP3.com offered creators a venue to
7064 distribute their creativity, without demanding an exclusive engagement from
7067 To make this system work, however, MP3.com needed a reliable way to
7068 recommend music to its users. The idea behind this alternative was to
7069 leverage the revealed preferences of music listeners to recommend new
7070 artists. If you like Lyle Lovett, you're likely to enjoy Bonnie Raitt. And
7071 so on.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2596764"></a>
7073 This idea required a simple way to gather data about user preferences.
7074 MP3.com came up with an extraordinarily clever way to gather this preference
7075 data. In January
2000, the company launched a service called
7076 my.mp3.com. Using software provided by MP3.com, a user would sign into an
7077 account and then insert into her computer a CD. The software would identify
7078 the CD, and then give the user access to that content. So, for example, if
7079 you inserted a CD by Jill Sobule, then wherever you were
—at work or at
7080 home
—you could get access to that music once you signed into your
7081 account. The system was therefore a kind of music-lockbox.
7084 No doubt some could use this system to illegally copy content. But that
7085 opportunity existed with or without MP3.com. The aim of the my.mp3.com
7086 service was to give users access to their own content, and as a by-product,
7087 by seeing the content they already owned, to discover the kind of content
7090 To make this system function, however, MP3.com needed to copy
50,
000 CDs to
7091 a server. (In principle, it could have been the user who uploaded the music,
7092 but that would have taken a great deal of time, and would have produced a
7093 product of questionable quality.) It therefore purchased
50,
000 CDs from a
7094 store, and started the process of making copies of those CDs. Again, it
7095 would not serve the content from those copies to anyone except those who
7096 authenticated that they had a copy of the CD they wanted to access. So while
7097 this was
50,
000 copies, it was
50,
000 copies directed at giving customers
7098 something they had already bought.
7099 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"idxvivendiuniversal"></a><p>
7100 Nine days after MP3.com launched its service, the five major labels, headed
7101 by the RIAA, brought a lawsuit against MP3.com. MP3.com settled with four of
7102 the five. Nine months later, a federal judge found MP3.com to have been
7103 guilty of willful infringement with respect to the fifth. Applying the law
7104 as it is, the judge imposed a fine against MP3.com of $
118 million. MP3.com
7105 then settled with the remaining plaintiff, Vivendi Universal, paying over
7106 $
54 million. Vivendi purchased MP3.com just about a year later.
7108 Den delen av historien har jeg fortalt før. Nå kommer konklusjonen.
7110 After Vivendi purchased MP3.com, Vivendi turned around and filed a
7111 malpractice lawsuit against the lawyers who had advised it that they had a
7112 good faith claim that the service they wanted to offer would be considered
7113 legal under copyright law. This lawsuit alleged that it should have been
7114 obvious that the courts would find this behavior illegal; therefore, this
7115 lawsuit sought to punish any lawyer who had dared to suggest that the law
7116 was less restrictive than the labels demanded.
7119 Den åpenbare hensikten med dette søksmålet (som ble avsluttet med et forlik
7120 for et uspesifisert beløp like etter at saken ikke lenger fikk
7121 pressedekning), var å sende en melding som ikke kan misforstås til advokater
7122 som gir råd til klienter på dette området: Det er ikke bare dine klienter
7123 som får lide hvis innholdsindustrien retter sine våpen mot dem. Det får
7124 også du. Så de av dere som tror loven burde være mindre restriktiv bør
7125 innse at et slikt syn på loven vil koste deg og ditt firma dyrt.
7126 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2596877"></a><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2596885"></a><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2596891"></a><p>
7127 This strategy is not just limited to the lawyers. In April
2003, Universal
7128 and EMI brought a lawsuit against Hummer Winblad, the venture capital firm
7129 (VC) that had funded Napster at a certain stage of its development, its
7130 cofounder ( John Hummer), and general partner (Hank Barry).
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2596905" href=
"#ftn.id2596905" class=
"footnote">160</a>]
</sup> The claim here, as well, was that the VC should
7131 have recognized the right of the content industry to control how the
7132 industry should develop. They should be held personally liable for funding a
7133 company whose business turned out to be beyond the law. Here again, the aim
7134 of the lawsuit is transparent: Any VC now recognizes that if you fund a
7135 company whose business is not approved of by the dinosaurs, you are at risk
7136 not just in the marketplace, but in the courtroom as well. Your investment
7137 buys you not only a company, it also buys you a lawsuit. So extreme has the
7138 environment become that even car manufacturers are afraid of technologies
7139 that touch content. In an article in
<em class=
"citetitle">Business
2.0</em>,
7140 Rafe Needleman describes a discussion with BMW:
7141 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2596948"></a><p>
7142 I asked why, with all the storage capacity and computer power in the car,
7143 there was no way to play MP3 files. I was told that BMW engineers in Germany
7144 had rigged a new vehicle to play MP3s via the car's built-in sound system,
7145 but that the company's marketing and legal departments weren't comfortable
7146 with pushing this forward for release stateside. Even today, no new cars are
7147 sold in the United States with bona fide MP3 players. . . .
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2596964" href=
"#ftn.id2596964" class=
"footnote">161</a>]
</sup>
7148 </p></blockquote></div><p>
7149 Dette er verden til mafiaen
—fylt med "penger eller livet"-trusler, som
7150 ikke er regulert av domstolene men av trusler som loven gir
7151 rettighetsinnehaver mulighet til å komme med. Det er et system som åpenbart
7152 og nødvendigvis vil kvele ny innovasjon. Det er vanskelig nok å starte et
7153 selskap. Det blir helt umulig hvis selskapet er stadig truet av søksmål.
7158 The point is not that businesses should have a right to start illegal
7159 enterprises. The point is the definition of "illegal." The law is a mess of
7160 uncertainty. We have no good way to know how it should apply to new
7161 technologies. Yet by reversing our tradition of judicial deference, and by
7162 embracing the astonishingly high penalties that copyright law imposes, that
7163 uncertainty now yields a reality which is far more conservative than is
7164 right. If the law imposed the death penalty for parking tickets, we'd not
7165 only have fewer parking tickets, we'd also have much less driving. The same
7166 principle applies to innovation. If innovation is constantly checked by this
7167 uncertain and unlimited liability, we will have much less vibrant innovation
7168 and much less creativity.
7170 The point is directly parallel to the crunchy-lefty point about fair
7171 use. Whatever the "real" law is, realism about the effect of law in both
7172 contexts is the same. This wildly punitive system of regulation will
7173 systematically stifle creativity and innovation. It will protect some
7174 industries and some creators, but it will harm industry and creativity
7175 generally. Free market and free culture depend upon vibrant competition.
7176 Yet the effect of the law today is to stifle just this kind of competition.
7177 The effect is to produce an overregulated culture, just as the effect of too
7178 much control in the market is to produce an overregulatedregulated market.
7181 The building of a permission culture, rather than a free culture, is the
7182 first important way in which the changes I have described will burden
7183 innovation. A permission culture means a lawyer's culture
—a culture in
7184 which the ability to create requires a call to your lawyer. Again, I am not
7185 antilawyer, at least when they're kept in their proper place. I am certainly
7186 not antilaw. But our profession has lost the sense of its limits. And
7187 leaders in our profession have lost an appreciation of the high costs that
7188 our profession imposes upon others. The inefficiency of the law is an
7189 embarrassment to our tradition. And while I believe our profession should
7190 therefore do everything it can to make the law more efficient, it should at
7191 least do everything it can to limit the reach of the law where the law is
7192 not doing any good. The transaction costs buried within a permission culture
7193 are enough to bury a wide range of creativity. Someone needs to do a lot of
7194 justifying to justify that result. The uncertainty of the law is one burden
7195 on innovation. There is a second burden that operates more directly. This is
7196 the effort by many in the content industry to use the law to directly
7197 regulate the technology of the Internet so that it better protects their
7200 The motivation for this response is obvious. The Internet enables the
7201 efficient spread of content. That efficiency is a feature of the Internet's
7202 design. But from the perspective of the content industry, this feature is a
7203 "bug." The efficient spread of content means that content distributors have
7204 a harder time controlling the distribution of content. One obvious response
7205 to this efficiency is thus to make the Internet less efficient. If the
7206 Internet enables "piracy," then, this response says, we should break the
7207 kneecaps of the Internet.
7209 The examples of this form of legislation are many. At the urging of the
7210 content industry, some in Congress have threatened legislation that would
7211 require computers to determine whether the content they access is protected
7212 or not, and to disable the spread of protected content.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2597086" href=
"#ftn.id2597086" class=
"footnote">162</a>]
</sup> Congress has already launched proceedings to
7213 explore a mandatory "broadcast flag" that would be required on any device
7214 capable of transmitting digital video (i.e., a computer), and that would
7215 disable the copying of any content that is marked with a broadcast
7216 flag. Other members of Congress have proposed immunizing content providers
7217 from liability for technology they might deploy that would hunt down
7218 copyright violators and disable their machines.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2597109" href=
"#ftn.id2597109" class=
"footnote">163</a>]
</sup>
7222 In one sense, these solutions seem sensible. If the problem is the code, why
7223 not regulate the code to remove the problem. But any regulation of technical
7224 infrastructure will always be tuned to the particular technology of the
7225 day. It will impose significant burdens and costs on the technology, but
7226 will likely be eclipsed by advances around exactly those requirements.
7228 In March
2002, a broad coalition of technology companies, led by Intel,
7229 tried to get Congress to see the harm that such legislation would
7230 impose.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2597133" href=
"#ftn.id2597133" class=
"footnote">164</a>]
</sup> Their argument was obviously
7231 not that copyright should not be protected. Instead, they argued, any
7232 protection should not do more harm than good.
7234 There is one more obvious way in which this war has harmed
7235 innovation
—again, a story that will be quite familiar to the free
7238 Copyright may be property, but like all property, it is also a form of
7239 regulation. It is a regulation that benefits some and harms others. When
7240 done right, it benefits creators and harms leeches. When done wrong, it is
7241 regulation the powerful use to defeat competitors.
7243 As I described in chapter
10, despite this feature of copyright as
7244 regulation, and subject to important qualifications outlined by Jessica
7245 Litman in her book
<em class=
"citetitle">Digital Copyright
</em>,
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2597166" href=
"#ftn.id2597166" class=
"footnote">165</a>]
</sup> overall this history of copyright is not bad. As
7246 chapter
10 details, when new technologies have come along, Congress has
7247 struck a balance to assure that the new is protected from the
7248 old. Compulsory, or statutory, licenses have been one part of that
7249 strategy. Free use (as in the case of the VCR) has been another.
7251 But that pattern of deference to new technologies has now changed with the
7252 rise of the Internet. Rather than striking a balance between the claims of a
7253 new technology and the legitimate rights of content creators, both the
7254 courts and Congress have imposed legal restrictions that will have the
7255 effect of smothering the new to benefit the old.
7257 The response by the courts has been fairly universal.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2597202" href=
"#ftn.id2597202" class=
"footnote">166</a>]
</sup> It has been mirrored in the responses threatened
7258 and actually implemented by Congress. I won't catalog all of those responses
7259 here.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2597237" href=
"#ftn.id2597237" class=
"footnote">167</a>]
</sup> But there is one example that
7260 captures the flavor of them all. This is the story of the demise of Internet
7266 As I described in chapter
4, when a radio station plays a song, the
7267 recording artist doesn't get paid for that "radio performance" unless he or
7268 she is also the composer. So, for example if Marilyn Monroe had recorded a
7269 version of "Happy Birthday"
—to memorialize her famous performance
7270 before President Kennedy at Madison Square Garden
— then whenever that
7271 recording was played on the radio, the current copyright owners of "Happy
7272 Birthday" would get some money, whereas Marilyn Monroe would not.
7274 The reasoning behind this balance struck by Congress makes some sense. The
7275 justification was that radio was a kind of advertising. The recording artist
7276 thus benefited because by playing her music, the radio station was making it
7277 more likely that her records would be purchased. Thus, the recording artist
7278 got something, even if only indirectly. Probably this reasoning had less to
7279 do with the result than with the power of radio stations: Their lobbyists
7280 were quite good at stopping any efforts to get Congress to require
7281 compensation to the recording artists.
7283 Enter Internet radio. Like regular radio, Internet radio is a technology to
7284 stream content from a broadcaster to a listener. The broadcast travels
7285 across the Internet, not across the ether of radio spectrum. Thus, I can
7286 "tune in" to an Internet radio station in Berlin while sitting in San
7287 Francisco, even though there's no way for me to tune in to a regular radio
7288 station much beyond the San Francisco metropolitan area.
7290 This feature of the architecture of Internet radio means that there are
7291 potentially an unlimited number of radio stations that a user could tune in
7292 to using her computer, whereas under the existing architecture for broadcast
7293 radio, there is an obvious limit to the number of broadcasters and clear
7294 broadcast frequencies. Internet radio could therefore be more competitive
7295 than regular radio; it could provide a wider range of selections. And
7296 because the potential audience for Internet radio is the whole world, niche
7297 stations could easily develop and market their content to a relatively large
7298 number of users worldwide. According to some estimates, more than eighty
7299 million users worldwide have tuned in to this new form of radio.
7304 Internet radio is thus to radio what FM was to AM. It is an improvement
7305 potentially vastly more significant than the FM improvement over AM, since
7306 not only is the technology better, so, too, is the competition. Indeed,
7307 there is a direct parallel between the fight to establish FM radio and the
7308 fight to protect Internet radio. As one author describes Howard Armstrong's
7309 struggle to enable FM radio,
7310 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
7311 An almost unlimited number of FM stations was possible in the shortwaves,
7312 thus ending the unnatural restrictions imposed on radio in the crowded
7313 longwaves. If FM were freely developed, the number of stations would be
7314 limited only by economics and competition rather than by technical
7315 restrictions. . . . Armstrong likened the situation that had grown up in
7316 radio to that following the invention of the printing press, when
7317 governments and ruling interests attempted to control this new instrument of
7318 mass communications by imposing restrictive licenses on it. This tyranny was
7319 broken only when it became possible for men freely to acquire printing
7320 presses and freely to run them. FM in this sense was as great an invention
7321 as the printing presses, for it gave radio the opportunity to strike off its
7322 shackles.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2597364" href=
"#ftn.id2597364" class=
"footnote">168</a>]
</sup>
7323 </p></blockquote></div><p>
7324 This potential for FM radio was never realized
—not because Armstrong
7325 was wrong about the technology, but because he underestimated the power of
7326 "vested interests, habits, customs and legislation"
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2597148" href=
"#ftn.id2597148" class=
"footnote">169</a>]
</sup> to retard the growth of this competing technology.
7328 Now the very same claim could be made about Internet radio. For again, there
7329 is no technical limitation that could restrict the number of Internet radio
7330 stations. The only restrictions on Internet radio are those imposed by the
7331 law. Copyright law is one such law. So the first question we should ask is,
7332 what copyright rules would govern Internet radio?
7335 But here the power of the lobbyists is reversed. Internet radio is a new
7336 industry. The recording artists, on the other hand, have a very powerful
7337 lobby, the RIAA. Thus when Congress considered the phenomenon of Internet
7338 radio in
1995, the lobbyists had primed Congress to adopt a different rule
7339 for Internet radio than the rule that applies to terrestrial radio. While
7340 terrestrial radio does not have to pay our hypothetical Marilyn Monroe when
7341 it plays her hypothetical recording of "Happy Birthday" on the air,
7342 <span class=
"emphasis"><em>Internet radio does
</em></span>. Not only is the law not neutral
7343 toward Internet radio
—the law actually burdens Internet radio more
7344 than it burdens terrestrial radio.
7346 This financial burden is not slight. As Harvard law professor William Fisher
7347 estimates, if an Internet radio station distributed adfree popular music to
7348 (on average) ten thousand listeners, twenty-four hours a day, the total
7349 artist fees that radio station would owe would be over $
1 million a
7350 year.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2597423" href=
"#ftn.id2597423" class=
"footnote">170</a>]
</sup> A regular radio station
7351 broadcasting the same content would pay no equivalent fee.
7353 The burden is not financial only. Under the original rules that were
7354 proposed, an Internet radio station (but not a terrestrial radio station)
7355 would have to collect the following data from
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>every listening
7356 transaction
</em></span>:
7357 </p><div class=
"orderedlist"><ol class=
"orderedlist" type=
"1"><li class=
"listitem"><p>
7358 name of the service;
7359 </p></li><li class=
"listitem"><p>
7360 channel of the program (AM/FM stations use station ID);
7361 </p></li><li class=
"listitem"><p>
7362 type of program (archived/looped/live);
7363 </p></li><li class=
"listitem"><p>
7364 date of transmission;
7365 </p></li><li class=
"listitem"><p>
7366 time of transmission;
7367 </p></li><li class=
"listitem"><p>
7368 time zone of origination of transmission;
7369 </p></li><li class=
"listitem"><p>
7370 numeric designation of the place of the sound recording within the program;
7371 </p></li><li class=
"listitem"><p>
7372 duration of transmission (to nearest second);
7373 </p></li><li class=
"listitem"><p>
7374 sound recording title;
7375 </p></li><li class=
"listitem"><p>
7376 ISRC code of the recording;
7377 </p></li><li class=
"listitem"><p>
7378 release year of the album per copyright notice and in the case of
7379 compilation albums, the release year of the album and copy- right date of
7381 </p></li><li class=
"listitem"><p>
7382 featured recording artist;
7383 </p></li><li class=
"listitem"><p>
7385 </p></li><li class=
"listitem"><p>
7387 </p></li><li class=
"listitem"><p>
7388 UPC code of the retail album;
7389 </p></li><li class=
"listitem"><p>
7391 </p></li><li class=
"listitem"><p>
7392 copyright owner information;
7393 </p></li><li class=
"listitem"><p>
7394 musical genre of the channel or program (station format);
7395 </p></li><li class=
"listitem"><p>
7396 name of the service or entity;
7397 </p></li><li class=
"listitem"><p>
7399 </p></li><li class=
"listitem"><p>
7400 date and time that the user logged in (in the user's time zone);
7401 </p></li><li class=
"listitem"><p>
7402 date and time that the user logged out (in the user's time zone);
7403 </p></li><li class=
"listitem"><p>
7404 time zone where the signal was received (user);
7405 </p></li><li class=
"listitem"><p>
7406 Unique User identifier;
7407 </p></li><li class=
"listitem"><p>
7408 the country in which the user received the transmissions.
7409 </p></li></ol></div><p>
7410 The Librarian of Congress eventually suspended these reporting requirements,
7411 pending further study. And he also changed the original rates set by the
7412 arbitration panel charged with setting rates. But the basic difference
7413 between Internet radio and terrestrial radio remains: Internet radio has to
7414 pay a
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>type of copyright fee
</em></span> that terrestrial radio does
7417 Why? What justifies this difference? Was there any study of the economic
7418 consequences from Internet radio that would justify these differences? Was
7419 the motive to protect artists against piracy?
7420 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2597635"></a><p>
7421 In a rare bit of candor, one RIAA expert admitted what seemed obvious to
7422 everyone at the time. As Alex Alben, vice president for Public Policy at
7423 Real Networks, told me,
7424 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
7426 The RIAA, which was representing the record labels, presented some testimony
7427 about what they thought a willing buyer would pay to a willing seller, and
7428 it was much higher. It was ten times higher than what radio stations pay to
7429 perform the same songs for the same period of time. And so the attorneys
7430 representing the webcasters asked the RIAA, . . . "How do you come up with a
7431 rate that's so much higher? Why is it worth more than radio? Because here we
7432 have hundreds of thousands of webcasters who want to pay, and that should
7433 establish the market rate, and if you set the rate so high, you're going to
7434 drive the small webcasters out of business. . . ."
7436 And the RIAA experts said, "Well, we don't really model this as an industry
7437 with thousands of webcasters,
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>we think it should be an industry
7438 with, you know, five or seven big players who can pay a high rate and it's a
7439 stable, predictable market
</em></span>." (Emphasis added.)
7440 </p></blockquote></div><p>
7441 Translation: The aim is to use the law to eliminate competition, so that
7442 this platform of potentially immense competition, which would cause the
7443 diversity and range of content available to explode, would not cause pain to
7444 the dinosaurs of old. There is no one, on either the right or the left, who
7445 should endorse this use of the law. And yet there is practically no one, on
7446 either the right or the left, who is doing anything effective to prevent it.
7447 </p></div><div class=
"section" title=
"Corrupting Citizens"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h2 class=
"title" style=
"clear: both"><a name=
"corruptingcitizens"></a>Corrupting Citizens
</h2></div></div></div><p>
7448 Overregulation stifles creativity. It smothers innovation. It gives
7449 dinosaurs a veto over the future. It wastes the extraordinary opportunity
7450 for a democratic creativity that digital technology enables.
7452 In addition to these important harms, there is one more that was important
7453 to our forebears, but seems forgotten today. Overregulation corrupts
7454 citizens and weakens the rule of law.
7457 The war that is being waged today is a war of prohibition. As with every war
7458 of prohibition, it is targeted against the behavior of a very large number
7459 of citizens. According to
<em class=
"citetitle">The New York Times
</em>,
43
7460 million Americans downloaded music in May
2002.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2597722" href=
"#ftn.id2597722" class=
"footnote">171</a>]
</sup> According to the RIAA, the behavior of those
43 million Americans
7461 is a felony. We thus have a set of rules that transform
20 percent of
7462 America into criminals. As the RIAA launches lawsuits against not only the
7463 Napsters and Kazaas of the world, but against students building search
7464 engines, and increasingly against ordinary users downloading content, the
7465 technologies for sharing will advance to further protect and hide illegal
7466 use. It is an arms race or a civil war, with the extremes of one side
7467 inviting a more extreme response by the other.
7469 The content industry's tactics exploit the failings of the American legal
7470 system. When the RIAA brought suit against Jesse Jordan, it knew that in
7471 Jordan it had found a scapegoat, not a defendant. The threat of having to
7472 pay either all the money in the world in damages ($
15,
000,
000) or almost all
7473 the money in the world to defend against paying all the money in the world
7474 in damages ($
250,
000 in legal fees) led Jordan to choose to pay all the
7475 money he had in the world ($
12,
000) to make the suit go away. The same
7476 strategy animates the RIAA's suits against individual users. In September
7477 2003, the RIAA sued
261 individuals
—including a twelve-year-old girl
7478 living in public housing and a seventy-year-old man who had no idea what
7479 file sharing was.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2597414" href=
"#ftn.id2597414" class=
"footnote">172</a>]
</sup> As these scapegoats
7480 discovered, it will always cost more to defend against these suits than it
7481 would cost to simply settle. (The twelve year old, for example, like Jesse
7482 Jordan, paid her life savings of $
2,
000 to settle the case.) Our law is an
7483 awful system for defending rights. It is an embarrassment to our
7484 tradition. And the consequence of our law as it is, is that those with the
7485 power can use the law to quash any rights they oppose.
7487 Wars of prohibition are nothing new in America. This one is just something
7488 more extreme than anything we've seen before. We experimented with alcohol
7489 prohibition, at a time when the per capita consumption of alcohol was
1.5
7490 gallons per capita per year. The war against drinking initially reduced that
7491 consumption to just
30 percent of its preprohibition levels, but by the end
7492 of prohibition, consumption was up to
70 percent of the preprohibition
7493 level. Americans were drinking just about as much, but now, a vast number
7494 were criminals.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2597797" href=
"#ftn.id2597797" class=
"footnote">173</a>]
</sup> We have launched a war
7495 on drugs aimed at reducing the consumption of regulated narcotics that
7
7496 percent (or
16 million) Americans now use.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2597810" href=
"#ftn.id2597810" class=
"footnote">174</a>]
</sup> That is a drop from the high (so to speak) in
1979 of
14 percent of
7497 the population. We regulate automobiles to the point where the vast majority
7498 of Americans violate the law every day. We run such a complex tax system
7499 that a majority of cash businesses regularly cheat.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2597827" href=
"#ftn.id2597827" class=
"footnote">175</a>]
</sup> We pride ourselves on our "free society," but an
7500 endless array of ordinary behavior is regulated within our society. And as a
7501 result, a huge proportion of Americans regularly violate at least some law.
7503 This state of affairs is not without consequence. It is a particularly
7504 salient issue for teachers like me, whose job it is to teach law students
7505 about the importance of "ethics." As my colleague Charlie Nesson told a
7506 class at Stanford, each year law schools admit thousands of students who
7507 have illegally downloaded music, illegally consumed alcohol and sometimes
7508 drugs, illegally worked without paying taxes, illegally driven cars. These
7509 are kids for whom behaving illegally is increasingly the norm. And then we,
7510 as law professors, are supposed to teach them how to behave
7511 ethically
—how to say no to bribes, or keep client funds separate, or
7512 honor a demand to disclose a document that will mean that your case is
7513 over. Generations of Americans
—more significantly in some parts of
7514 America than in others, but still, everywhere in America today
—can't
7515 live their lives both normally and legally, since "normally" entails a
7516 certain degree of illegality.
7518 The response to this general illegality is either to enforce the law more
7519 severely or to change the law. We, as a society, have to learn how to make
7520 that choice more rationally. Whether a law makes sense depends, in part, at
7521 least, upon whether the costs of the law, both intended and collateral,
7522 outweigh the benefits. If the costs, intended and collateral, do outweigh
7523 the benefits, then the law ought to be changed. Alternatively, if the costs
7524 of the existing system are much greater than the costs of an alternative,
7525 then we have a good reason to consider the alternative.
7530 My point is not the idiotic one: Just because people violate a law, we
7531 should therefore repeal it. Obviously, we could reduce murder statistics
7532 dramatically by legalizing murder on Wednesdays and Fridays. But that
7533 wouldn't make any sense, since murder is wrong every day of the week. A
7534 society is right to ban murder always and everywhere.
7536 My point is instead one that democracies understood for generations, but
7537 that we recently have learned to forget. The rule of law depends upon people
7538 obeying the law. The more often, and more repeatedly, we as citizens
7539 experience violating the law, the less we respect the law. Obviously, in
7540 most cases, the important issue is the law, not respect for the law. I don't
7541 care whether the rapist respects the law or not; I want to catch and
7542 incarcerate the rapist. But I do care whether my students respect the
7543 law. And I do care if the rules of law sow increasing disrespect because of
7544 the extreme of regulation they impose. Twenty million Americans have come
7545 of age since the Internet introduced this different idea of "sharing." We
7546 need to be able to call these twenty million Americans "citizens," not
7549 When at least forty-three million citizens download content from the
7550 Internet, and when they use tools to combine that content in ways
7551 unauthorized by copyright holders, the first question we should be asking is
7552 not how best to involve the FBI. The first question should be whether this
7553 particular prohibition is really necessary in order to achieve the proper
7554 ends that copyright law serves. Is there another way to assure that artists
7555 get paid without transforming forty-three million Americans into felons?
7556 Does it make sense if there are other ways to assure that artists get paid
7557 without transforming America into a nation of felons?
7559 This abstract point can be made more clear with a particular example.
7562 We all own CDs. Many of us still own phonograph records. These pieces of
7563 plastic encode music that in a certain sense we have bought. The law
7564 protects our right to buy and sell that plastic: It is not a copyright
7565 infringement for me to sell all my classical records at a used record store
7566 and buy jazz records to replace them. That "use" of the recordings is free.
7568 But as the MP3 craze has demonstrated, there is another use of phonograph
7569 records that is effectively free. Because these recordings were made without
7570 copy-protection technologies, I am "free" to copy, or "rip," music from my
7571 records onto a computer hard disk. Indeed, Apple Corporation went so far as
7572 to suggest that "freedom" was a right: In a series of commercials, Apple
7573 endorsed the "Rip, Mix, Burn" capacities of digital technologies.
7574 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2597960"></a><p>
7575 This "use" of my records is certainly valuable. I have begun a large process
7576 at home of ripping all of my and my wife's CDs, and storing them in one
7577 archive. Then, using Apple's iTunes, or a wonderful program called
7578 Andromeda, we can build different play lists of our music: Bach, Baroque,
7579 Love Songs, Love Songs of Significant Others
—the potential is
7580 endless. And by reducing the costs of mixing play lists, these technologies
7581 help build a creativity with play lists that is itself independently
7582 valuable. Compilations of songs are creative and meaningful in their own
7585 This use is enabled by unprotected media
—either CDs or records. But
7586 unprotected media also enable file sharing. File sharing threatens (or so
7587 the content industry believes) the ability of creators to earn a fair return
7588 from their creativity. And thus, many are beginning to experiment with
7589 technologies to eliminate unprotected media. These technologies, for
7590 example, would enable CDs that could not be ripped. Or they might enable spy
7591 programs to identify ripped content on people's machines.
7594 If these technologies took off, then the building of large archives of your
7595 own music would become quite difficult. You might hang in hacker circles,
7596 and get technology to disable the technologies that protect the
7597 content. Trading in those technologies is illegal, but maybe that doesn't
7598 bother you much. In any case, for the vast majority of people, these
7599 protection technologies would effectively destroy the archiving use of
7600 CDs. The technology, in other words, would force us all back to the world
7601 where we either listened to music by manipulating pieces of plastic or were
7602 part of a massively complex "digital rights management" system.
7604 If the only way to assure that artists get paid were the elimination of the
7605 ability to freely move content, then these technologies to interfere with
7606 the freedom to move content would be justifiable. But what if there were
7607 another way to assure that artists are paid, without locking down any
7608 content? What if, in other words, a different system could assure
7609 compensation to artists while also preserving the freedom to move content
7612 My point just now is not to prove that there is such a system. I offer a
7613 version of such a system in the last chapter of this book. For now, the only
7614 point is the relatively uncontroversial one: If a different system achieved
7615 the same legitimate objectives that the existing copyright system achieved,
7616 but left consumers and creators much more free, then we'd have a very good
7617 reason to pursue this alternative
—namely, freedom. The choice, in
7618 other words, would not be between property and piracy; the choice would be
7619 between different property systems and the freedoms each allowed.
7621 I believe there is a way to assure that artists are paid without turning
7622 forty-three million Americans into felons. But the salient feature of this
7623 alternative is that it would lead to a very different market for producing
7624 and distributing creativity. The dominant few, who today control the vast
7625 majority of the distribution of content in the world, would no longer
7626 exercise this extreme of control. Rather, they would go the way of the
7629 Except that this generation's buggy manufacturers have already saddled
7630 Congress, and are riding the law to protect themselves against this new form
7631 of competition. For them the choice is between fortythree million Americans
7632 as criminals and their own survival.
7634 It is understandable why they choose as they do. It is not understandable
7635 why we as a democracy continue to choose as we do. Jack Valenti is charming;
7636 but not so charming as to justify giving up a tradition as deep and
7637 important as our tradition of free culture. There's one more aspect to this
7638 corruption that is particularly important to civil liberties, and follows
7639 directly from any war of prohibition. As Electronic Frontier Foundation
7640 attorney Fred von Lohmann describes, this is the "collateral damage" that
7641 "arises whenever you turn a very large percentage of the population into
7642 criminals." This is the collateral damage to civil liberties generally.
7643 <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2598065"></a>
7645 "Hvis du kan behandle noen som en antatt lovbryter," forklarer von Lohmann,
7646 <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2598078"></a>
7647 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
7648 then all of a sudden a lot of basic civil liberty protections evaporate to
7649 one degree or another. . . . If you're a copyright infringer, how can you
7650 hope to have any privacy rights? If you're a copyright infringer, how can
7651 you hope to be secure against seizures of your computer? How can you hope to
7652 continue to receive Internet access? . . . Our sensibilities change as soon
7653 as we think, "Oh, well, but that person's a criminal, a lawbreaker." Well,
7654 what this campaign against file sharing has done is turn a remarkable
7655 percentage of the American Internet-using population into "lawbreakers."
7656 </p></blockquote></div><p>
7657 And the consequence of this transformation of the American public into
7658 criminals is that it becomes trivial, as a matter of due process, to
7659 effectively erase much of the privacy most would presume.
7661 Users of the Internet began to see this generally in
2003 as the RIAA
7662 launched its campaign to force Internet service providers to turn over the
7663 names of customers who the RIAA believed were violating copyright
7664 law. Verizon fought that demand and lost. With a simple request to a judge,
7665 and without any notice to the customer at all, the identity of an Internet
7669 The RIAA then expanded this campaign, by announcing a general strategy to
7670 sue individual users of the Internet who are alleged to have downloaded
7671 copyrighted music from file-sharing systems. But as we've seen, the
7672 potential damages from these suits are astronomical: If a family's computer
7673 is used to download a single CD's worth of music, the family could be liable
7674 for $
2 million in damages. That didn't stop the RIAA from suing a number of
7675 these families, just as they had sued Jesse Jordan.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2598129" href=
"#ftn.id2598129" class=
"footnote">176</a>]
</sup>
7678 Even this understates the espionage that is being waged by the RIAA. A
7679 report from CNN late last summer described a strategy the RIAA had adopted
7680 to track Napster users.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2598170" href=
"#ftn.id2598170" class=
"footnote">177</a>]
</sup> Using a
7681 sophisticated hashing algorithm, the RIAA took what is in effect a
7682 fingerprint of every song in the Napster catalog. Any copy of one of those
7683 MP3s will have the same "fingerprint."
7685 So imagine the following not-implausible scenario: Imagine a friend gives a
7686 CD to your daughter
—a collection of songs just like the cassettes you
7687 used to make as a kid. You don't know, and neither does your daughter, where
7688 these songs came from. But she copies these songs onto her computer. She
7689 then takes her computer to college and connects it to a college network, and
7690 if the college network is "cooperating" with the RIAA's espionage, and she
7691 hasn't properly protected her content from the network (do you know how to
7692 do that yourself ?), then the RIAA will be able to identify your daughter as
7693 a "criminal." And under the rules that universities are beginning to
7694 deploy,
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2598028" href=
"#ftn.id2598028" class=
"footnote">178</a>]
</sup> your daughter can lose the
7695 right to use the university's computer network. She can, in some cases, be
7698 Now, of course, she'll have the right to defend herself. You can hire a
7699 lawyer for her (at $
300 per hour, if you're lucky), and she can plead that
7700 she didn't know anything about the source of the songs or that they came
7701 from Napster. And it may well be that the university believes her. But the
7702 university might not believe her. It might treat this "contraband" as
7703 presumptive of guilt. And as any number of college students have already
7704 learned, our presumptions about innocence disappear in the middle of wars of
7705 prohibition. This war is no different. Says von Lohmann,
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2598264"></a>
7706 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
7707 So when we're talking about numbers like forty to sixty million Americans
7708 that are essentially copyright infringers, you create a situation where the
7709 civil liberties of those people are very much in peril in a general
7710 matter. [I don't] think [there is any] analog where you could randomly
7711 choose any person off the street and be confident that they were committing
7712 an unlawful act that could put them on the hook for potential felony
7713 liability or hundreds of millions of dollars of civil liability. Certainly
7714 we all speed, but speeding isn't the kind of an act for which we routinely
7715 forfeit civil liberties. Some people use drugs, and I think that's the
7716 closest analog, [but] many have noted that the war against drugs has eroded
7717 all of our civil liberties because it's treated so many Americans as
7718 criminals. Well, I think it's fair to say that file sharing is an order of
7719 magnitude larger number of Americans than drug use. . . . If forty to sixty
7720 million Americans have become lawbreakers, then we're really on a slippery
7721 slope to lose a lot of civil liberties for all forty to sixty million of
7723 </p></blockquote></div><p>
7724 When forty to sixty million Americans are considered "criminals" under the
7725 law, and when the law could achieve the same objective
— securing
7726 rights to authors
—without these millions being considered "criminals,"
7727 who is the villain? Americans or the law? Which is American, a constant war
7728 on our own people or a concerted effort through our democracy to change our
7730 </p></div><div class=
"footnotes"><br><hr width=
"100" align=
"left"><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2596430" href=
"#id2596430" class=
"para">157</a>]
</sup>
7732 See Lynne W. Jeter,
<em class=
"citetitle">Disconnected: Deceit and Betrayal at
7733 WorldCom
</em> (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley
& Sons,
2003),
176,
204;
7734 for details of the settlement, see MCI press release, "MCI Wins
7735 U.S. District Court Approval for SEC Settlement" (
7 July
2003), available at
7736 <a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
37</a>.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2596453"></a>
7737 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2596466" href=
"#id2596466" class=
"para">158</a>]
</sup>
7738 The bill, modeled after California's tort reform model, was passed in the
7739 House of Representatives but defeated in a Senate vote in July
2003. For an
7740 overview, see Tanya Albert, "Measure Stalls in Senate: `We'll Be Back,' Say
7741 Tort Reformers," amednews.com,
28 July
2003, available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
38</a>, and "Senate Turns Back
7742 Malpractice Caps," CBSNews.com,
9 July
2003, available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
39</a>. President Bush has
7743 continued to urge tort reform in recent months.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2596490"></a>
7744 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2596063" href=
"#id2596063" class=
"para">159</a>]
</sup>
7748 See Danit Lidor, "Artists Just Wanna Be Free,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Wired
</em>,
7749 7 July
2003, available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link
7750 #
40</a>. For an overview of the exhibition, see
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
41</a>.
7751 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2596905" href=
"#id2596905" class=
"para">160</a>]
</sup>
7754 See Joseph Menn, "Universal, EMI Sue Napster Investor,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Los
7755 Angeles Times
</em>,
23 April
2003. For a parallel argument about the
7756 effects on innovation in the distribution of music, see Janelle Brown, "The
7757 Music Revolution Will Not Be Digitized," Salon.com,
1 June
2001, available
7758 at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
42</a>. See also
7759 Jon Healey, "Online Music Services Besieged,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Los Angeles
7760 Times
</em>,
28 May
2001.
7761 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2596964" href=
"#id2596964" class=
"para">161</a>]
</sup>
7763 Rafe Needleman, "Driving in Cars with MP3s,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Business
7764 2.0</em>,
16 June
2003, available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
43</a>. I am grateful to
7765 Dr. Mohammad Al-Ubaydli for this example.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2596980"></a>
7766 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2597086" href=
"#id2597086" class=
"para">162</a>]
</sup>
7768 "Copyright and Digital Media in a Post-Napster World," GartnerG2 and the
7769 Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School (
2003),
7770 33–35, available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link
7772 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2597109" href=
"#id2597109" class=
"para">163</a>]
</sup>
7774 GartnerG2,
26–27.
7775 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2597133" href=
"#id2597133" class=
"para">164</a>]
</sup>
7777 See David McGuire, "Tech Execs Square Off Over Piracy," Newsbytes, February
7778 2002 (Entertainment).
7779 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2597166" href=
"#id2597166" class=
"para">165</a>]
</sup>
7780 Jessica Litman,
<em class=
"citetitle">Digital Copyright
</em> (Amherst, N.Y.:
7781 Prometheus Books,
2001).
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2597174"></a>
7782 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2597202" href=
"#id2597202" class=
"para">166</a>]
</sup>
7785 The only circuit court exception is found in
<em class=
"citetitle">Recording Industry
7786 Association of America (RIAA)
</em> v.
<em class=
"citetitle">Diamond Multimedia
7787 Systems
</em>,
180 F.
3d
1072 (
9th Cir.
1999). There the court of
7788 appeals for the Ninth Circuit reasoned that makers of a portable MP3 player
7789 were not liable for contributory copyright infringement for a device that is
7790 unable to record or redistribute music (a device whose only copying function
7791 is to render portable a music file already stored on a user's hard drive).
7792 At the district court level, the only exception is found in
7793 <em class=
"citetitle">Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios,
7794 Inc
</em>. v.
<em class=
"citetitle">Grokster, Ltd
</em>.,
259 F. Supp.
2d
7795 1029 (C.D. Cal.,
2003), where the court found the link between the
7796 distributor and any given user's conduct too attenuated to make the
7797 distributor liable for contributory or vicarious infringement liability.
7798 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2597237" href=
"#id2597237" class=
"para">167</a>]
</sup>
7800 For example, in July
2002, Representative Howard Berman introduced the
7801 Peer-to-Peer Piracy Prevention Act (H.R.
5211), which would immunize
7802 copyright holders from liability for damage done to computers when the
7803 copyright holders use technology to stop copyright infringement. In August
7804 2002, Representative Billy Tauzin introduced a bill to mandate that
7805 technologies capable of rebroadcasting digital copies of films broadcast on
7806 TV (i.e., computers) respect a "broadcast flag" that would disable copying
7807 of that content. And in March of the same year, Senator Fritz Hollings
7808 introduced the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act,
7809 which mandated copyright protection technology in all digital media
7810 devices. See GartnerG2, "Copyright and Digital Media in a Post-Napster
7811 World,"
27 June
2003,
33–34, available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
44</a>.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2597245"></a>
7812 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2597364" href=
"#id2597364" class=
"para">168</a>]
</sup>
7816 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2597148" href=
"#id2597148" class=
"para">169</a>]
</sup>
7820 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2597423" href=
"#id2597423" class=
"para">170</a>]
</sup>
7822 This example was derived from fees set by the original Copyright Arbitration
7823 Royalty Panel (CARP) proceedings, and is drawn from an example offered by
7824 Professor William Fisher. Conference Proceedings, iLaw (Stanford),
3 July
7825 2003, on file with author. Professors Fisher and Zittrain submitted
7826 testimony in the CARP proceeding that was ultimately rejected. See Jonathan
7827 Zittrain, Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings and Ephemeral
7828 Recordings, Docket No.
2000-
9, CARP DTRA
1 and
2, available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
45</a>. For an excellent
7829 analysis making a similar point, see Randal C. Picker, "Copyright as Entry
7830 Policy: The Case of Digital Distribution,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Antitrust
7831 Bulletin
</em> (Summer/Fall
2002):
461: "This was not confusion, these
7832 are just old-fashioned entry barriers. Analog radio stations are protected
7833 from digital entrants, reducing entry in radio and diversity. Yes, this is
7834 done in the name of getting royalties to copyright holders, but, absent the
7835 play of powerful interests, that could have been done in a media-neutral
7836 way."
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2597453"></a> <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2597462"></a>
7837 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2597722" href=
"#id2597722" class=
"para">171</a>]
</sup>
7839 Mike Graziano and Lee Rainie, "The Music Downloading Deluge," Pew Internet
7840 and American Life Project (
24 April
2001), available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
46</a>. The Pew Internet and
7841 American Life Project reported that
37 million Americans had downloaded
7842 music files from the Internet by early
2001.
7843 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2597414" href=
"#id2597414" class=
"para">172</a>]
</sup>
7846 Alex Pham, "The Labels Strike Back: N.Y. Girl Settles RIAA Case,"
7847 <em class=
"citetitle">Los Angeles Times
</em>,
10 September
2003, Business.
7848 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2597797" href=
"#id2597797" class=
"para">173</a>]
</sup>
7851 Jeffrey A. Miron and Jeffrey Zwiebel, "Alcohol Consumption During
7852 Prohibition,"
<em class=
"citetitle">American Economic Review
</em> 81, no.
2
7854 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2597810" href=
"#id2597810" class=
"para">174</a>]
</sup>
7857 National Drug Control Policy: Hearing Before the House Government Reform
7858 Committee,
108th Cong.,
1st sess. (
5 March
2003) (statement of John
7859 P. Walters, director of National Drug Control Policy).
7860 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2597827" href=
"#id2597827" class=
"para">175</a>]
</sup>
7863 See James Andreoni, Brian Erard, and Jonathon Feinstein, "Tax Compliance,"
7864 <em class=
"citetitle">Journal of Economic Literature
</em> 36 (
1998):
818 (survey
7865 of compliance literature).
7866 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2598129" href=
"#id2598129" class=
"para">176</a>]
</sup>
7869 See Frank Ahrens, "RIAA's Lawsuits Meet Surprised Targets; Single Mother in
7870 Calif.,
12-Year-Old Girl in N.Y. Among Defendants,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Washington
7871 Post
</em>,
10 September
2003, E1; Chris Cobbs, "Worried Parents Pull
7872 Plug on File `Stealing'; With the Music Industry Cracking Down on File
7873 Swapping, Parents are Yanking Software from Home PCs to Avoid Being Sued,"
7874 <em class=
"citetitle">Orlando Sentinel Tribune
</em>,
30 August
2003, C1;
7875 Jefferson Graham, "Recording Industry Sues Parents,"
<em class=
"citetitle">USA
7876 Today
</em>,
15 September
2003,
4D; John Schwartz, "She Says She's No
7877 Music Pirate. No Snoop Fan, Either,"
<em class=
"citetitle">New York Times
</em>,
7878 25 September
2003, C1; Margo Varadi, "Is Brianna a Criminal?"
7879 <em class=
"citetitle">Toronto Star
</em>,
18 September
2003, P7.
7880 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2598170" href=
"#id2598170" class=
"para">177</a>]
</sup>
7883 See "Revealed: How RIAA Tracks Downloaders: Music Industry Discloses Some
7884 Methods Used," CNN.com, available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
47</a>.
7885 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2598028" href=
"#id2598028" class=
"para">178</a>]
</sup>
7888 See Jeff Adler, "Cambridge: On Campus, Pirates Are Not Penitent,"
7889 <em class=
"citetitle">Boston Globe
</em>,
18 May
2003, City Weekly,
1; Frank
7890 Ahrens, "Four Students Sued over Music Sites; Industry Group Targets File
7891 Sharing at Colleges,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Washington Post
</em>,
4 April
2003,
7892 E1; Elizabeth Armstrong, "Students `Rip, Mix, Burn' at Their Own Risk,"
7893 <em class=
"citetitle">Christian Science Monitor
</em>,
2 September
2003,
20;
7894 Robert Becker and Angela Rozas, "Music Pirate Hunt Turns to Loyola; Two
7895 Students Names Are Handed Over; Lawsuit Possible,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Chicago
7896 Tribune
</em>,
16 July
2003,
1C; Beth Cox, "RIAA Trains Antipiracy
7897 Guns on Universities,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Internet News
</em>,
30 January
7898 2003, available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link
7899 #
48</a>; Benny Evangelista, "Download Warning
101: Freshman Orientation
7900 This Fall to Include Record Industry Warnings Against File Sharing,"
7901 <em class=
"citetitle">San Francisco Chronicle
</em>,
11 August
2003, E11; "Raid,
7902 Letters Are Weapons at Universities,"
<em class=
"citetitle">USA Today
</em>,
26
7904 </p></div></div></div></div><div class=
"part" title=
"Del IV. Maktfordeling"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h1 class=
"title"><a name=
"c-balances"></a>Del IV. Maktfordeling
</h1></div></div></div><div class=
"partintro" title=
"Maktfordeling"><div></div><p>
7905 Så her er bildet: Du står på siden av veien. Bilen din er på brann. Du er
7906 sint og opprørt fordi du delvis bidro til å starte brannen. Nå vet du ikke
7907 hvordan du slokker den. Ved siden av deg er en bøtte, fylt med
7908 bensin. Bensin vil åpenbart ikke slukke brannen.
7910 Mens du tenker over situasjonen, kommer noen andre forbi. I panikk griper
7911 hun bøtta, og før du har hatt sjansen til å be henne stoppe
—eller før
7912 hun forstår hvorfor hun bør stoppe
—er bøtten i svevet. Bensinen er på
7913 tur mot den brennende bilen. Og brannen som bensinen kommer til å fyre opp
7914 vil straks sette fyr på alt i omgivelsene.
7916 En krig om opphavsrett pågår over alt
— og vi fokuserer alle på feil
7917 ting. Det er ingen tvil om at dagens teknologier truer eksisterende
7918 virksomheter. Uten tvil kan de true artister. Men teknologier endrer seg.
7919 Industrien og teknologer har en rekke måter å bruke teknologi til å beskytte
7920 dem selv mot dagens trusler på Internet. Dette er en brann som overlatt til
7921 seg selv vil brenne ut.
7925 Likevel er ikke besluttningstagere villig til å la denne brannen i fred.
7926 Ladet med masse penger fra lobbyister er de lystne på å gå i mellom for å
7927 fjerne problemet slik de oppfatter det. Men problemet slik de oppfatter det
7928 er ikke den reelle trusselen som denne kulturen står med ansiktet mot. For
7929 mens vi ser på denne lille brannen i hjørnet er det en massiv endring i
7930 hvordan kultur blir skapt som pågår over alt.
7932 På en eller annen måte må vi klare å snu oppmerksomheten mot dette mer
7933 viktige og fundametale problemet. Vi må finne en måte å unngå å helle
7934 bensin på denne brannen.
7936 Vi har ikke funne denne måten ennå. Istedet synes vi å være fanget i en
7937 enklere og sort-hvit tenkning. Uansett hvor mange folk som presser på for å
7938 gjøre rammen for debatten litt bredere, er det dette enkle sort-hvit-synet
7939 som består. Vi kjører sakte forbi og stirrer på brannen når vi i stedet
7940 burde holde øynene på veien.
7942 Denne utfordringen har vært livet mitt de siste årene. Det har også vært
7943 min falitt. I de to neste kapittlene, beskriver jeg en liten innsats, så
7944 langt uten suksess, på å finne en måte å endre fokus på denne debatten. Vi
7945 må forstå disse mislyktede forsøkene hvis vi skal forstå hva som kreves for
7947 </p><div class=
"toc"><p><b>Innholdsfortegnelse
</b></p><dl><dt><span class=
"chapter"><a href=
"#eldred">14. Kapittel tretten: Eldred
</a></span></dt><dt><span class=
"chapter"><a href=
"#eldred-ii">15. Kapittel fjorten: Eldred II
</a></span></dt></dl></div></div><div class=
"chapter" title=
"Kapittel 14. Kapittel tretten: Eldred"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h2 class=
"title"><a name=
"eldred"></a>Kapittel
14. Kapittel tretten: Eldred
</h2></div></div></div><p>
7948 In
1995, a father was frustrated that his daughters didn't seem to like
7949 Hawthorne. No doubt there was more than one such father, but at least one
7950 did something about it. Eric Eldred, a retired computer programmer living in
7951 New Hampshire, decided to put Hawthorne on the Web. An electronic version,
7952 Eldred thought, with links to pictures and explanatory text, would make this
7953 nineteenth-century author's work come alive.
7955 It didn't work
—at least for his daughters. They didn't find Hawthorne
7956 any more interesting than before. But Eldred's experiment gave birth to a
7957 hobby, and his hobby begat a cause: Eldred would build a library of public
7958 domain works by scanning these works and making them available for free.
7961 Eldred's library was not simply a copy of certain public domain works,
7962 though even a copy would have been of great value to people across the world
7963 who can't get access to printed versions of these works. Instead, Eldred was
7964 producing derivative works from these public domain works. Just as Disney
7965 turned Grimm into stories more accessible to the twentieth century, Eldred
7966 transformed Hawthorne, and many others, into a form more
7967 accessible
—technically accessible
—today.
7969 Eldred's freedom to do this with Hawthorne's work grew from the same source
7970 as Disney's. Hawthorne's
<em class=
"citetitle">Scarlet Letter
</em> had passed
7971 into the public domain in
1907. It was free for anyone to take without the
7972 permission of the Hawthorne estate or anyone else. Some, such as Dover Press
7973 and Penguin Classics, take works from the public domain and produce printed
7974 editions, which they sell in bookstores across the country. Others, such as
7975 Disney, take these stories and turn them into animated cartoons, sometimes
7976 successfully (
<em class=
"citetitle">Cinderella
</em>), sometimes not
7977 (
<em class=
"citetitle">The Hunchback of Notre Dame
</em>,
<em class=
"citetitle">Treasure
7978 Planet
</em>). These are all commercial publications of public domain
7981 The Internet created the possibility of noncommercial publications of public
7982 domain works. Eldred's is just one example. There are literally thousands of
7983 others. Hundreds of thousands from across the world have discovered this
7984 platform of expression and now use it to share works that are, by law, free
7985 for the taking. This has produced what we might call the "noncommercial
7986 publishing industry," which before the Internet was limited to people with
7987 large egos or with political or social causes. But with the Internet, it
7988 includes a wide range of individuals and groups dedicated to spreading
7989 culture generally.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2598507" href=
"#ftn.id2598507" class=
"footnote">179</a>]
</sup>
7991 As I said, Eldred lives in New Hampshire. In
1998, Robert Frost's collection
7992 of poems
<em class=
"citetitle">New Hampshire
</em> was slated to pass into the
7993 public domain. Eldred wanted to post that collection in his free public
7994 library. But Congress got in the way. As I described in chapter
10, in
7995 1998, for the eleventh time in forty years, Congress extended the terms of
7996 existing copyrights
—this time by twenty years. Eldred would not be
7997 free to add any works more recent than
1923 to his collection until
2019.
7998 Indeed, no copyrighted work would pass into the public domain until that
7999 year (and not even then, if Congress extends the term again). By contrast,
8000 in the same period, more than
1 million patents will pass into the public
8005 This was the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA), enacted in
8006 memory of the congressman and former musician Sonny Bono, who, his widow,
8007 Mary Bono, says, believed that "copyrights should be forever."
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2598556" href=
"#ftn.id2598556" class=
"footnote">180</a>]
</sup>
8010 Eldred decided to fight this law. He first resolved to fight it through
8011 civil disobedience. In a series of interviews, Eldred announced that he
8012 would publish as planned, CTEA notwithstanding. But because of a second law
8013 passed in
1998, the NET (No Electronic Theft) Act, his act of publishing
8014 would make Eldred a felon
—whether or not anyone complained. This was a
8015 dangerous strategy for a disabled programmer to undertake.
8017 It was here that I became involved in Eldred's battle. I was a
8018 constitutional scholar whose first passion was constitutional
8019 interpretation. And though constitutional law courses never focus upon the
8020 Progress Clause of the Constitution, it had always struck me as importantly
8021 different. As you know, the Constitution says,
8022 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
8023 Congress has the power to promote the Progress of Science . . . by securing
8024 for limited Times to Authors . . . exclusive Right to their
8025 . . . Writings. . . .
8026 </p></blockquote></div><p>
8027 As I've described, this clause is unique within the power-granting clause of
8028 Article I, section
8 of our Constitution. Every other clause granting power
8029 to Congress simply says Congress has the power to do something
—for
8030 example, to regulate "commerce among the several states" or "declare War."
8031 But here, the "something" is something quite specific
—to "promote
8032 . . . Progress"
—through means that are also specific
— by
8033 "securing" "exclusive Rights" (i.e., copyrights) "for limited Times."
8035 In the past forty years, Congress has gotten into the practice of extending
8036 existing terms of copyright protection. What puzzled me about this was, if
8037 Congress has the power to extend existing terms, then the Constitution's
8038 requirement that terms be "limited" will have no practical effect. If every
8039 time a copyright is about to expire, Congress has the power to extend its
8040 term, then Congress can achieve what the Constitution plainly
8041 forbids
—perpetual terms "on the installment plan," as Professor Peter
8042 Jaszi so nicely put it.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2598598"></a>
8044 As an academic, my first response was to hit the books. I remember sitting
8045 late at the office, scouring on-line databases for any serious consideration
8046 of the question. No one had ever challenged Congress's practice of extending
8047 existing terms. That failure may in part be why Congress seemed so
8048 untroubled in its habit. That, and the fact that the practice had become so
8049 lucrative for Congress. Congress knows that copyright owners will be willing
8050 to pay a great deal of money to see their copyright terms extended. And so
8051 Congress is quite happy to keep this gravy train going.
8053 For this is the core of the corruption in our present system of
8054 government. "Corruption" not in the sense that representatives are bribed.
8055 Rather, "corruption" in the sense that the system induces the beneficiaries
8056 of Congress's acts to raise and give money to Congress to induce it to
8057 act. There's only so much time; there's only so much Congress can do. Why
8058 not limit its actions to those things it must do
—and those things that
8059 pay? Extending copyright terms pays.
8061 If that's not obvious to you, consider the following: Say you're one of the
8062 very few lucky copyright owners whose copyright continues to make money one
8063 hundred years after it was created. The Estate of Robert Frost is a good
8064 example. Frost died in
1963. His poetry continues to be extraordinarily
8065 valuable. Thus the Robert Frost estate benefits greatly from any extension
8066 of copyright, since no publisher would pay the estate any money if the poems
8067 Frost wrote could be published by anyone for free.
8069 So imagine the Robert Frost estate is earning $
100,
000 a year from three of
8070 Frost's poems. And imagine the copyright for those poems is about to
8071 expire. You sit on the board of the Robert Frost estate. Your financial
8072 adviser comes to your board meeting with a very grim report:
8075 "Next year," the adviser announces, "our copyrights in works A, B, and C
8076 will expire. That means that after next year, we will no longer be receiving
8077 the annual royalty check of $
100,
000 from the publishers of those works.
8079 "There's a proposal in Congress, however," she continues, "that could change
8080 this. A few congressmen are floating a bill to extend the terms of copyright
8081 by twenty years. That bill would be extraordinarily valuable to us. So we
8082 should hope this bill passes."
8084 "Hope?" a fellow board member says. "Can't we be doing something about it?"
8086 "Well, obviously, yes," the adviser responds. "We could contribute to the
8087 campaigns of a number of representatives to try to assure that they support
8090 You hate politics. You hate contributing to campaigns. So you want to know
8091 whether this disgusting practice is worth it. "How much would we get if this
8092 extension were passed?" you ask the adviser. "How much is it worth?"
8094 "Well," the adviser says, "if you're confident that you will continue to get
8095 at least $
100,
000 a year from these copyrights, and you use the `discount
8096 rate' that we use to evaluate estate investments (
6 percent), then this law
8097 would be worth $
1,
146,
000 to the estate."
8099 You're a bit shocked by the number, but you quickly come to the correct
8102 "So you're saying it would be worth it for us to pay more than $
1,
000,
000 in
8103 campaign contributions if we were confident those contributions would assure
8104 that the bill was passed?"
8106 "Absolutely," the adviser responds. "It is worth it to you to contribute up
8107 to the `present value' of the income you expect from these copyrights. Which
8108 for us means over $
1,
000,
000."
8111 You quickly get the point
—you as the member of the board and, I trust,
8112 you the reader. Each time copyrights are about to expire, every beneficiary
8113 in the position of the Robert Frost estate faces the same choice: If they
8114 can contribute to get a law passed to extend copyrights, they will benefit
8115 greatly from that extension. And so each time copyrights are about to
8116 expire, there is a massive amount of lobbying to get the copyright term
8119 Thus a congressional perpetual motion machine: So long as legislation can be
8120 bought (albeit indirectly), there will be all the incentive in the world to
8121 buy further extensions of copyright.
8123 In the lobbying that led to the passage of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term
8124 Extension Act, this "theory" about incentives was proved real. Ten of the
8125 thirteen original sponsors of the act in the House received the maximum
8126 contribution from Disney's political action committee; in the Senate, eight
8127 of the twelve sponsors received contributions.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2598783" href=
"#ftn.id2598783" class=
"footnote">181</a>]
</sup> The RIAA and the MPAA are estimated to have spent over $
1.5 million
8128 lobbying in the
1998 election cycle. They paid out more than $
200,
000 in
8129 campaign contributions.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2598798" href=
"#ftn.id2598798" class=
"footnote">182</a>]
</sup> Disney is
8130 estimated to have contributed more than $
800,
000 to reelection campaigns in
8131 the cycle.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2598812" href=
"#ftn.id2598812" class=
"footnote">183</a>]
</sup>
8134 Constitutional law is not oblivious to the obvious. Or at least, it need not
8135 be. So when I was considering Eldred's complaint, this reality about the
8136 never-ending incentives to increase the copyright term was central to my
8137 thinking. In my view, a pragmatic court committed to interpreting and
8138 applying the Constitution of our framers would see that if Congress has the
8139 power to extend existing terms, then there would be no effective
8140 constitutional requirement that terms be "limited." If they could extend it
8141 once, they would extend it again and again and again.
8144 It was also my judgment that
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>this
</em></span> Supreme Court would
8145 not allow Congress to extend existing terms. As anyone close to the Supreme
8146 Court's work knows, this Court has increasingly restricted the power of
8147 Congress when it has viewed Congress's actions as exceeding the power
8148 granted to it by the Constitution. Among constitutional scholars, the most
8149 famous example of this trend was the Supreme Court's decision in
1995 to
8150 strike down a law that banned the possession of guns near schools.
8152 Since
1937, the Supreme Court had interpreted Congress's granted powers very
8153 broadly; so, while the Constitution grants Congress the power to regulate
8154 only "commerce among the several states" (aka "interstate commerce"), the
8155 Supreme Court had interpreted that power to include the power to regulate
8156 any activity that merely affected interstate commerce.
8158 As the economy grew, this standard increasingly meant that there was no
8159 limit to Congress's power to regulate, since just about every activity, when
8160 considered on a national scale, affects interstate commerce. A Constitution
8161 designed to limit Congress's power was instead interpreted to impose no
8164 The Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Rehnquist's command, changed that in
8165 <em class=
"citetitle">United States
</em> v.
<em class=
"citetitle">Lopez
</em>. The
8166 government had argued that possessing guns near schools affected interstate
8167 commerce. Guns near schools increase crime, crime lowers property values,
8168 and so on. In the oral argument, the Chief Justice asked the government
8169 whether there was any activity that would not affect interstate commerce
8170 under the reasoning the government advanced. The government said there was
8171 not; if Congress says an activity affects interstate commerce, then that
8172 activity affects interstate commerce. The Supreme Court, the government
8173 said, was not in the position to second-guess Congress.
8175 "We pause to consider the implications of the government's arguments," the
8176 Chief Justice wrote.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2598903" href=
"#ftn.id2598903" class=
"footnote">184</a>]
</sup> If anything
8177 Congress says is interstate commerce must therefore be considered interstate
8178 commerce, then there would be no limit to Congress's power. The decision in
8179 <em class=
"citetitle">Lopez
</em> was reaffirmed five years later in
8180 <em class=
"citetitle">United States
</em>
8181 v.
<em class=
"citetitle">Morrison
</em>.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2598930" href=
"#ftn.id2598930" class=
"footnote">185</a>]
</sup>
8184 If a principle were at work here, then it should apply to the Progress
8185 Clause as much as the Commerce Clause.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2598950" href=
"#ftn.id2598950" class=
"footnote">186</a>]
</sup>
8186 And if it is applied to the Progress Clause, the principle should yield the
8187 conclusion that Congress can't extend an existing term. If Congress could
8188 extend an existing term, then there would be no "stopping point" to
8189 Congress's power over terms, though the Constitution expressly states that
8190 there is such a limit. Thus, the same principle applied to the power to
8191 grant copyrights should entail that Congress is not allowed to extend the
8192 term of existing copyrights.
8194 <span class=
"emphasis"><em>If
</em></span>, that is, the principle announced in
8195 <em class=
"citetitle">Lopez
</em> stood for a principle. Many believed the
8196 decision in
<em class=
"citetitle">Lopez
</em> stood for politics
—a
8197 conservative Supreme Court, which believed in states' rights, using its
8198 power over Congress to advance its own personal political preferences. But I
8199 rejected that view of the Supreme Court's decision. Indeed, shortly after
8200 the decision, I wrote an article demonstrating the "fidelity" in such an
8201 interpretation of the Constitution. The idea that the Supreme Court decides
8202 cases based upon its politics struck me as extraordinarily boring. I was
8203 not going to devote my life to teaching constitutional law if these nine
8204 Justices were going to be petty politicians.
8206 Now let's pause for a moment to make sure we understand what the argument in
8207 <em class=
"citetitle">Eldred
</em> was not about. By insisting on the
8208 Constitution's limits to copyright, obviously Eldred was not endorsing
8209 piracy. Indeed, in an obvious sense, he was fighting a kind of
8210 piracy
—piracy of the public domain. When Robert Frost wrote his work
8211 and when Walt Disney created Mickey Mouse, the maximum copyright term was
8212 just fifty-six years. Because of interim changes, Frost and Disney had
8213 already enjoyed a seventy-five-year monopoly for their work. They had gotten
8214 the benefit of the bargain that the Constitution envisions: In exchange for
8215 a monopoly protected for fifty-six years, they created new work. But now
8216 these entities were using their power
—expressed through the power of
8217 lobbyists' money
—to get another twenty-year dollop of monopoly. That
8218 twenty-year dollop would be taken from the public domain. Eric Eldred was
8219 fighting a piracy that affects us all.
8221 Some people view the public domain with contempt. In their brief before the
8222 Supreme Court, the Nashville Songwriters Association wrote that the public
8223 domain is nothing more than "legal piracy."
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2599029" href=
"#ftn.id2599029" class=
"footnote">187</a>]
</sup> But it is not piracy when the law allows it; and in our
8224 constitutional system, our law requires it. Some may not like the
8225 Constitution's requirements, but that doesn't make the Constitution a
8228 As we've seen, our constitutional system requires limits on copyright as a
8229 way to assure that copyright holders do not too heavily influence the
8230 development and distribution of our culture. Yet, as Eric Eldred discovered,
8231 we have set up a system that assures that copyright terms will be repeatedly
8232 extended, and extended, and extended. We have created the perfect storm for
8233 the public domain. Copyrights have not expired, and will not expire, so long
8234 as Congress is free to be bought to extend them again.
8236 It is valuable copyrights that are responsible for terms being extended.
8237 Mickey Mouse and "Rhapsody in Blue." These works are too valuable for
8238 copyright owners to ignore. But the real harm to our society from copyright
8239 extensions is not that Mickey Mouse remains Disney's. Forget Mickey
8240 Mouse. Forget Robert Frost. Forget all the works from the
1920s and
1930s
8241 that have continuing commercial value. The real harm of term extension comes
8242 not from these famous works. The real harm is to the works that are not
8243 famous, not commercially exploited, and no longer available as a result.
8245 If you look at the work created in the first twenty years (
1923 to
1942)
8246 affected by the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act,
2 percent of that
8247 work has any continuing commercial value. It was the copyright holders for
8248 that
2 percent who pushed the CTEA through. But the law and its effect were
8249 not limited to that
2 percent. The law extended the terms of copyright
8250 generally.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2599088" href=
"#ftn.id2599088" class=
"footnote">188</a>]
</sup>
8254 Think practically about the consequence of this extension
—practically,
8255 as a businessperson, and not as a lawyer eager for more legal work. In
1930,
8256 10,
047 books were published. In
2000,
174 of those books were still in
8257 print. Let's say you were Brewster Kahle, and you wanted to make available
8258 to the world in your iArchive project the remaining
9,
873. What would you
8261 Well, first, you'd have to determine which of the
9,
873 books were still
8262 under copyright. That requires going to a library (these data are not
8263 on-line) and paging through tomes of books, cross-checking the titles and
8264 authors of the
9,
873 books with the copyright registration and renewal
8265 records for works published in
1930. That will produce a list of books still
8268 Then for the books still under copyright, you would need to locate the
8269 current copyright owners. How would you do that?
8271 Most people think that there must be a list of these copyright owners
8272 somewhere. Practical people think this way. How could there be thousands and
8273 thousands of government monopolies without there being at least a list?
8275 But there is no list. There may be a name from
1930, and then in
1959, of
8276 the person who registered the copyright. But just think practically about
8277 how impossibly difficult it would be to track down thousands of such
8278 records
—especially since the person who registered is not necessarily
8279 the current owner. And we're just talking about
1930!
8281 "But there isn't a list of who owns property generally," the apologists for
8282 the system respond. "Why should there be a list of copyright owners?"
8284 Well, actually, if you think about it, there
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>are
</em></span> plenty
8285 of lists of who owns what property. Think about deeds on houses, or titles
8286 to cars. And where there isn't a list, the code of real space is pretty
8287 good at suggesting who the owner of a bit of property is. (A swing set in
8288 your backyard is probably yours.) So formally or informally, we have a
8289 pretty good way to know who owns what tangible property.
8292 So: You walk down a street and see a house. You can know who owns the house
8293 by looking it up in the courthouse registry. If you see a car, there is
8294 ordinarily a license plate that will link the owner to the car. If you see a
8295 bunch of children's toys sitting on the front lawn of a house, it's fairly
8296 easy to determine who owns the toys. And if you happen to see a baseball
8297 lying in a gutter on the side of the road, look around for a second for some
8298 kids playing ball. If you don't see any kids, then okay: Here's a bit of
8299 property whose owner we can't easily determine. It is the exception that
8300 proves the rule: that we ordinarily know quite well who owns what property.
8302 Compare this story to intangible property. You go into a library. The
8303 library owns the books. But who owns the copyrights? As I've already
8304 described, there's no list of copyright owners. There are authors' names, of
8305 course, but their copyrights could have been assigned, or passed down in an
8306 estate like Grandma's old jewelry. To know who owns what, you would have to
8307 hire a private detective. The bottom line: The owner cannot easily be
8308 located. And in a regime like ours, in which it is a felony to use such
8309 property without the property owner's permission, the property isn't going
8312 The consequence with respect to old books is that they won't be digitized,
8313 and hence will simply rot away on shelves. But the consequence for other
8314 creative works is much more dire.
8315 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2599210"></a><p>
8316 Consider the story of Michael Agee, chairman of Hal Roach Studios, which
8317 owns the copyrights for the Laurel and Hardy films. Agee is a direct
8318 beneficiary of the Bono Act. The Laurel and Hardy films were made between
8319 1921 and
1951. Only one of these films,
<em class=
"citetitle">The Lucky
8320 Dog
</em>, is currently out of copyright. But for the CTEA, films made
8321 after
1923 would have begun entering the public domain. Because Agee
8322 controls the exclusive rights for these popular films, he makes a great deal
8323 of money. According to one estimate, "Roach has sold about
60,
000
8324 videocassettes and
50,
000 DVDs of the duo's silent films."
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2599232" href=
"#ftn.id2599232" class=
"footnote">189</a>]
</sup> <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2599249"></a>
8326 Yet Agee opposed the CTEA. His reasons demonstrate a rare virtue in this
8327 culture: selflessness. He argued in a brief before the Supreme Court that
8328 the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act will, if left standing, destroy
8329 a whole generation of American film.
8332 His argument is straightforward. A tiny fraction of this work has any
8333 continuing commercial value. The rest
—to the extent it survives at
8334 all
—sits in vaults gathering dust. It may be that some of this work
8335 not now commercially valuable will be deemed to be valuable by the owners of
8336 the vaults. For this to occur, however, the commercial benefit from the work
8337 must exceed the costs of making the work available for distribution.
8339 We can't know the benefits, but we do know a lot about the costs. For most
8340 of the history of film, the costs of restoring film were very high; digital
8341 technology has lowered these costs substantially. While it cost more than
8342 $
10,
000 to restore a ninety-minute black-and-white film in
1993, it can now
8343 cost as little as $
100 to digitize one hour of mm film.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2599286" href=
"#ftn.id2599286" class=
"footnote">190</a>]
</sup>
8346 Restoration technology is not the only cost, nor the most important.
8347 Lawyers, too, are a cost, and increasingly, a very important one. In
8348 addition to preserving the film, a distributor needs to secure the rights.
8349 And to secure the rights for a film that is under copyright, you need to
8350 locate the copyright owner.
8352 Or more accurately,
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>owners
</em></span>. As we've seen, there isn't
8353 only a single copyright associated with a film; there are many. There isn't
8354 a single person whom you can contact about those copyrights; there are as
8355 many as can hold the rights, which turns out to be an extremely large
8356 number. Thus the costs of clearing the rights to these films is
8359 "But can't you just restore the film, distribute it, and then pay the
8360 copyright owner when she shows up?" Sure, if you want to commit a
8361 felony. And even if you're not worried about committing a felony, when she
8362 does show up, she'll have the right to sue you for all the profits you have
8363 made. So, if you're successful, you can be fairly confident you'll be
8364 getting a call from someone's lawyer. And if you're not successful, you
8365 won't make enough to cover the costs of your own lawyer. Either way, you
8366 have to talk to a lawyer. And as is too often the case, saying you have to
8367 talk to a lawyer is the same as saying you won't make any money.
8370 For some films, the benefit of releasing the film may well exceed these
8371 costs. But for the vast majority of them, there is no way the benefit would
8372 outweigh the legal costs. Thus, for the vast majority of old films, Agee
8373 argued, the film will not be restored and distributed until the copyright
8376 But by the time the copyright for these films expires, the film will have
8377 expired. These films were produced on nitrate-based stock, and nitrate stock
8378 dissolves over time. They will be gone, and the metal canisters in which
8379 they are now stored will be filled with nothing more than dust.
8381 Of all the creative work produced by humans anywhere, a tiny fraction has
8382 continuing commercial value. For that tiny fraction, the copyright is a
8383 crucially important legal device. For that tiny fraction, the copyright
8384 creates incentives to produce and distribute the creative work. For that
8385 tiny fraction, the copyright acts as an "engine of free expression."
8387 But even for that tiny fraction, the actual time during which the creative
8388 work has a commercial life is extremely short. As I've indicated, most books
8389 go out of print within one year. The same is true of music and
8390 film. Commercial culture is sharklike. It must keep moving. And when a
8391 creative work falls out of favor with the commercial distributors, the
8392 commercial life ends.
8394 Yet that doesn't mean the life of the creative work ends. We don't keep
8395 libraries of books in order to compete with Barnes
& Noble, and we don't
8396 have archives of films because we expect people to choose between spending
8397 Friday night watching new movies and spending Friday night watching a
1930
8398 news documentary. The noncommercial life of culture is important and
8399 valuable
—for entertainment but also, and more importantly, for
8400 knowledge. To understand who we are, and where we came from, and how we have
8401 made the mistakes that we have, we need to have access to this history.
8404 Copyrights in this context do not drive an engine of free expression. In
8405 this context, there is no need for an exclusive right. Copyrights in this
8408 Yet, for most of our history, they also did little harm. For most of our
8409 history, when a work ended its commercial life, there was no
8410 <span class=
"emphasis"><em>copyright-related use
</em></span> that would be inhibited by an
8411 exclusive right. When a book went out of print, you could not buy it from a
8412 publisher. But you could still buy it from a used book store, and when a
8413 used book store sells it, in America, at least, there is no need to pay the
8414 copyright owner anything. Thus, the ordinary use of a book after its
8415 commercial life ended was a use that was independent of copyright law.
8417 The same was effectively true of film. Because the costs of restoring a
8418 film
—the real economic costs, not the lawyer costs
—were so high,
8419 it was never at all feasible to preserve or restore film. Like the remains
8420 of a great dinner, when it's over, it's over. Once a film passed out of its
8421 commercial life, it may have been archived for a bit, but that was the end
8422 of its life so long as the market didn't have more to offer.
8424 In other words, though copyright has been relatively short for most of our
8425 history, long copyrights wouldn't have mattered for the works that lost
8426 their commercial value. Long copyrights for these works would not have
8427 interfered with anything.
8429 But this situation has now changed.
8431 One crucially important consequence of the emergence of digital technologies
8432 is to enable the archive that Brewster Kahle dreams of. Digital
8433 technologies now make it possible to preserve and give access to all sorts
8434 of knowledge. Once a book goes out of print, we can now imagine digitizing
8435 it and making it available to everyone, forever. Once a film goes out of
8436 distribution, we could digitize it and make it available to everyone,
8437 forever. Digital technologies give new life to copyrighted material after it
8438 passes out of its commercial life. It is now possible to preserve and assure
8439 universal access to this knowledge and culture, whereas before it was not.
8443 And now copyright law does get in the way. Every step of producing this
8444 digital archive of our culture infringes on the exclusive right of
8445 copyright. To digitize a book is to copy it. To do that requires permission
8446 of the copyright owner. The same with music, film, or any other aspect of
8447 our culture protected by copyright. The effort to make these things
8448 available to history, or to researchers, or to those who just want to
8449 explore, is now inhibited by a set of rules that were written for a
8450 radically different context.
8452 Here is the core of the harm that comes from extending terms: Now that
8453 technology enables us to rebuild the library of Alexandria, the law gets in
8454 the way. And it doesn't get in the way for any useful
8455 <span class=
"emphasis"><em>copyright
</em></span> purpose, for the purpose of copyright is to
8456 enable the commercial market that spreads culture. No, we are talking about
8457 culture after it has lived its commercial life. In this context, copyright
8458 is serving no purpose
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>at all
</em></span> related to the spread of
8459 knowledge. In this context, copyright is not an engine of free
8460 expression. Copyright is a brake.
8462 You may well ask, "But if digital technologies lower the costs for Brewster
8463 Kahle, then they will lower the costs for Random House, too. So won't
8464 Random House do as well as Brewster Kahle in spreading culture widely?"
8466 Maybe. Someday. But there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that
8467 publishers would be as complete as libraries. If Barnes
& Noble offered
8468 to lend books from its stores for a low price, would that eliminate the need
8469 for libraries? Only if you think that the only role of a library is to serve
8470 what "the market" would demand. But if you think the role of a library is
8471 bigger than this
—if you think its role is to archive culture, whether
8472 there's a demand for any particular bit of that culture or not
—then we
8473 can't count on the commercial market to do our library work for us.
8475 I would be the first to agree that it should do as much as it can: We should
8476 rely upon the market as much as possible to spread and enable culture. My
8477 message is absolutely not antimarket. But where we see the market is not
8478 doing the job, then we should allow nonmarket forces the freedom to fill the
8479 gaps. As one researcher calculated for American culture,
94 percent of the
8480 films, books, and music produced between and
1946 is not commercially
8481 available. However much you love the commercial market, if access is a
8482 value, then
6 percent is a failure to provide that value.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2599516" href=
"#ftn.id2599516" class=
"footnote">191</a>]
</sup>
8485 In January
1999, we filed a lawsuit on Eric Eldred's behalf in federal
8486 district court in Washington, D.C., asking the court to declare the Sonny
8487 Bono Copyright Term Extension Act unconstitutional. The two central claims
8488 that we made were (
1) that extending existing terms violated the
8489 Constitution's "limited Times" requirement, and (
2) that extending terms by
8490 another twenty years violated the First Amendment.
8492 The district court dismissed our claims without even hearing an argument. A
8493 panel of the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit also dismissed our
8494 claims, though after hearing an extensive argument. But that decision at
8495 least had a dissent, by one of the most conservative judges on that
8496 court. That dissent gave our claims life.
8498 Judge David Sentelle said the CTEA violated the requirement that copyrights
8499 be for "limited Times" only. His argument was as elegant as it was simple:
8500 If Congress can extend existing terms, then there is no "stopping point" to
8501 Congress's power under the Copyright Clause. The power to extend existing
8502 terms means Congress is not required to grant terms that are "limited."
8503 Thus, Judge Sentelle argued, the court had to interpret the term "limited
8504 Times" to give it meaning. And the best interpretation, Judge Sentelle
8505 argued, would be to deny Congress the power to extend existing terms.
8507 We asked the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit as a whole to hear the
8508 case. Cases are ordinarily heard in panels of three, except for important
8509 cases or cases that raise issues specific to the circuit as a whole, where
8510 the court will sit "en banc" to hear the case.
8513 The Court of Appeals rejected our request to hear the case en banc. This
8514 time, Judge Sentelle was joined by the most liberal member of the
8515 D.C. Circuit, Judge David Tatel. Both the most conservative and the most
8516 liberal judges in the D.C. Circuit believed Congress had overstepped its
8519 It was here that most expected Eldred v. Ashcroft would die, for the Supreme
8520 Court rarely reviews any decision by a court of appeals. (It hears about one
8521 hundred cases a year, out of more than five thousand appeals.) And it
8522 practically never reviews a decision that upholds a statute when no other
8523 court has yet reviewed the statute.
8525 But in February
2002, the Supreme Court surprised the world by granting our
8526 petition to review the D.C. Circuit opinion. Argument was set for October of
8527 2002. The summer would be spent writing briefs and preparing for argument.
8529 It is over a year later as I write these words. It is still astonishingly
8530 hard. If you know anything at all about this story, you know that we lost
8531 the appeal. And if you know something more than just the minimum, you
8532 probably think there was no way this case could have been won. After our
8533 defeat, I received literally thousands of missives by well-wishers and
8534 supporters, thanking me for my work on behalf of this noble but doomed
8535 cause. And none from this pile was more significant to me than the e-mail
8536 from my client, Eric Eldred.
8538 Men min klient og disse vennene tok feil. Denne saken kunne vært vunnet. Det
8539 burde ha vært vunnet. Og uansett hvor hardt jeg prøver å fortelle den
8540 historien til meg selv, kan jeg aldri unnslippe troen på at det er min feil
8542 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2599635"></a><p>
8544 Feil ble gjort tidlig, skjønt den ble først åpenbart på slutten. Vår sak
8545 hadde støtte hos en ekstraordinær advokat, Geoffrey Stewart, helt fra
8546 starten, og hos advokatfirmaet hadde han flyttet til, Jones, Day, Reavis og
8547 Pogue. Jones Day mottok mye press fra sine opphavsrettsbeskyttende klienter
8548 på grunn av sin støtte til oss. De ignorert dette presset (noe veldig få
8549 advokatfirmaer noen sinne ville gjøre), og ga alt de hadde gjennom hele
8551 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2599658"></a><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2599664"></a><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2599670"></a><p>
8552 Det var tre viktige advokater på saken fra Jones DaY. Geoff Stewart var den
8553 først, men siden ble Dan Bromberg og Don Ayer ganske involvert. Bromberg og
8554 Ayer spesielt hadde en felles oppfatning om hvordan denne saken ville bli
8555 vunnet: vi ville bare vinne, fortalte de gjentatte ganger til meg, hvis vi
8556 få problemet til å virke "viktig" for Høyesterett. Det måtte synes som om
8557 dramatisk skade ble gjort til ytringsfriheten og fri kultur, ellers ville de
8558 aldri stemt mot "de mektigste mediaselskapene i verden".
8560 I hate this view of the law. Of course I thought the Sonny Bono Act was a
8561 dramatic harm to free speech and free culture. Of course I still think it
8562 is. But the idea that the Supreme Court decides the law based on how
8563 important they believe the issues are is just wrong. It might be "right" as
8564 in "true," I thought, but it is "wrong" as in "it just shouldn't be that
8565 way." As I believed that any faithful interpretation of what the framers of
8566 our Constitution did would yield the conclusion that the CTEA was
8567 unconstitutional, and as I believed that any faithful interpretation of what
8568 the First Amendment means would yield the conclusion that the power to
8569 extend existing copyright terms is unconstitutional, I was not persuaded
8570 that we had to sell our case like soap. Just as a law that bans the
8571 swastika is unconstitutional not because the Court likes Nazis but because
8572 such a law would violate the Constitution, so too, in my view, would the
8573 Court decide whether Congress's law was constitutional based on the
8574 Constitution, not based on whether they liked the values that the framers
8575 put in the Constitution.
8577 In any case, I thought, the Court must already see the danger and the harm
8578 caused by this sort of law. Why else would they grant review? There was no
8579 reason to hear the case in the Supreme Court if they weren't convinced that
8580 this regulation was harmful. So in my view, we didn't need to persuade them
8581 that this law was bad, we needed to show why it was unconstitutional.
8584 There was one way, however, in which I felt politics would matter and in
8585 which I thought a response was appropriate. I was convinced that the Court
8586 would not hear our arguments if it thought these were just the arguments of
8587 a group of lefty loons. This Supreme Court was not about to launch into a
8588 new field of judicial review if it seemed that this field of review was
8589 simply the preference of a small political minority. Although my focus in
8590 the case was not to demonstrate how bad the Sonny Bono Act was but to
8591 demonstrate that it was unconstitutional, my hope was to make this argument
8592 against a background of briefs that covered the full range of political
8593 views. To show that this claim against the CTEA was grounded in
8594 <span class=
"emphasis"><em>law
</em></span> and not politics, then, we tried to gather the
8595 widest range of credible critics
—credible not because they were rich
8596 and famous, but because they, in the aggregate, demonstrated that this law
8597 was unconstitutional regardless of one's politics.
8599 The first step happened all by itself. Phyllis Schlafly's organization,
8600 Eagle Forum, had been an opponent of the CTEA from the very beginning.
8601 Mrs. Schlafly viewed the CTEA as a sellout by Congress. In November
1998,
8602 she wrote a stinging editorial attacking the Republican Congress for
8603 allowing the law to pass. As she wrote, "Do you sometimes wonder why bills
8604 that create a financial windfall to narrow special interests slide easily
8605 through the intricate legislative process, while bills that benefit the
8606 general public seem to get bogged down?" The answer, as the editorial
8607 documented, was the power of money. Schlafly enumerated Disney's
8608 contributions to the key players on the committees. It was money, not
8609 justice, that gave Mickey Mouse twenty more years in Disney's control,
8610 Schlafly argued.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2599764"></a> <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2599770"></a>
8612 In the Court of Appeals, Eagle Forum was eager to file a brief supporting
8613 our position. Their brief made the argument that became the core claim in
8614 the Supreme Court: If Congress can extend the term of existing copyrights,
8615 there is no limit to Congress's power to set terms. That strong
8616 conservative argument persuaded a strong conservative judge, Judge Sentelle.
8618 In the Supreme Court, the briefs on our side were about as diverse as it
8619 gets. They included an extraordinary historical brief by the Free Software
8620 Foundation (home of the GNU project that made GNU/ Linux possible). They
8621 included a powerful brief about the costs of uncertainty by Intel. There
8622 were two law professors' briefs, one by copyright scholars and one by First
8623 Amendment scholars. There was an exhaustive and uncontroverted brief by the
8624 world's experts in the history of the Progress Clause. And of course, there
8625 was a new brief by Eagle Forum, repeating and strengthening its arguments.
8626 <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2599799"></a> <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2599807"></a>
8628 Those briefs framed a legal argument. Then to support the legal argument,
8629 there were a number of powerful briefs by libraries and archives, including
8630 the Internet Archive, the American Association of Law Libraries, and the
8631 National Writers Union.
8633 But two briefs captured the policy argument best. One made the argument I've
8634 already described: A brief by Hal Roach Studios argued that unless the law
8635 was struck, a whole generation of American film would disappear. The other
8636 made the economic argument absolutely clear.
8637 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2599830"></a><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2599836"></a><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2599843"></a><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2599849"></a><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2599855"></a><p>
8638 This economists' brief was signed by seventeen economists, including five
8639 Nobel Prize winners, including Ronald Coase, James Buchanan, Milton
8640 Friedman, Kenneth Arrow, and George Akerlof. The economists, as the list of
8641 Nobel winners demonstrates, spanned the political spectrum. Their
8642 conclusions were powerful: There was no plausible claim that extending the
8643 terms of existing copyrights would do anything to increase incentives to
8644 create. Such extensions were nothing more than "rent-seeking"
—the
8645 fancy term economists use to describe special-interest legislation gone
8648 The same effort at balance was reflected in the legal team we gathered to
8649 write our briefs in the case. The Jones Day lawyers had been with us from
8650 the start. But when the case got to the Supreme Court, we added three
8651 lawyers to help us frame this argument to this Court: Alan Morrison, a
8652 lawyer from Public Citizen, a Washington group that had made constitutional
8653 history with a series of seminal victories in the Supreme Court defending
8654 individual rights; my colleague and dean, Kathleen Sullivan, who had argued
8655 many cases in the Court, and who had advised us early on about a First
8656 Amendment strategy; and finally, former solicitor general Charles Fried.
8657 <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2599875"></a>
8659 Fried was a special victory for our side. Every other former solicitor
8660 general was hired by the other side to defend Congress's power to give media
8661 companies the special favor of extended copyright terms. Fried was the only
8662 one who turned down that lucrative assignment to stand up for something he
8663 believed in. He had been Ronald Reagan's chief lawyer in the Supreme
8664 Court. He had helped craft the line of cases that limited Congress's power
8665 in the context of the Commerce Clause. And while he had argued many
8666 positions in the Supreme Court that I personally disagreed with, his joining
8667 the cause was a vote of confidence in our argument.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2599911"></a>
8669 The government, in defending the statute, had its collection of friends, as
8670 well. Significantly, however, none of these "friends" included historians or
8671 economists. The briefs on the other side of the case were written
8672 exclusively by major media companies, congressmen, and copyright holders.
8674 The media companies were not surprising. They had the most to gain from the
8675 law. The congressmen were not surprising either
—they were defending
8676 their power and, indirectly, the gravy train of contributions such power
8677 induced. And of course it was not surprising that the copyright holders
8678 would defend the idea that they should continue to have the right to control
8679 who did what with content they wanted to control.
8681 Dr. Seuss's representatives, for example, argued that it was better for the
8682 Dr. Seuss estate to control what happened to Dr. Seuss's work
— better
8683 than allowing it to fall into the public domain
—because if this
8684 creativity were in the public domain, then people could use it to "glorify
8685 drugs or to create pornography."
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2599941" href=
"#ftn.id2599941" class=
"footnote">192</a>]
</sup> That
8686 was also the motive of the Gershwin estate, which defended its "protection"
8687 of the work of George Gershwin. They refuse, for example, to license
8688 <em class=
"citetitle">Porgy and Bess
</em> to anyone who refuses to use African
8689 Americans in the cast.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2599966" href=
"#ftn.id2599966" class=
"footnote">193</a>]
</sup> That's their
8690 view of how this part of American culture should be controlled, and they
8691 wanted this law to help them effect that control.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2599980"></a>
8693 This argument made clear a theme that is rarely noticed in this debate.
8694 When Congress decides to extend the term of existing copyrights, Congress is
8695 making a choice about which speakers it will favor. Famous and beloved
8696 copyright owners, such as the Gershwin estate and Dr. Seuss, come to
8697 Congress and say, "Give us twenty years to control the speech about these
8698 icons of American culture. We'll do better with them than anyone else."
8699 Congress of course likes to reward the popular and famous by giving them
8700 what they want. But when Congress gives people an exclusive right to speak
8701 in a certain way, that's just what the First Amendment is traditionally
8704 We argued as much in a final brief. Not only would upholding the CTEA mean
8705 that there was no limit to the power of Congress to extend
8706 copyrights
—extensions that would further concentrate the market; it
8707 would also mean that there was no limit to Congress's power to play
8708 favorites, through copyright, with who has the right to speak. Between
8709 February and October, there was little I did beyond preparing for this
8710 case. Early on, as I said, I set the strategy.
8712 The Supreme Court was divided into two important camps. One camp we called
8713 "the Conservatives." The other we called "the Rest." The Conservatives
8714 included Chief Justice Rehnquist, Justice O'Connor, Justice Scalia, Justice
8715 Kennedy, and Justice Thomas. These five had been the most consistent in
8716 limiting Congress's power. They were the five who had supported the
8717 <em class=
"citetitle">Lopez/Morrison
</em> line of cases that said that an
8718 enumerated power had to be interpreted to assure that Congress's powers had
8720 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2600041"></a><p>
8722 The Rest were the four Justices who had strongly opposed limits on
8723 Congress's power. These four
—Justice Stevens, Justice Souter, Justice
8724 Ginsburg, and Justice Breyer
—had repeatedly argued that the
8725 Constitution gives Congress broad discretion to decide how best to implement
8726 its powers. In case after case, these justices had argued that the Court's
8727 role should be one of deference. Though the votes of these four justices
8728 were the votes that I personally had most consistently agreed with, they
8729 were also the votes that we were least likely to get.
8731 In particular, the least likely was Justice Ginsburg's. In addition to her
8732 general view about deference to Congress (except where issues of gender are
8733 involved), she had been particularly deferential in the context of
8734 intellectual property protections. She and her daughter (an excellent and
8735 well-known intellectual property scholar) were cut from the same
8736 intellectual property cloth. We expected she would agree with the writings
8737 of her daughter: that Congress had the power in this context to do as it
8738 wished, even if what Congress wished made little sense.
8739 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2600075"></a><p>
8740 Close behind Justice Ginsburg were two justices whom we also viewed as
8741 unlikely allies, though possible surprises. Justice Souter strongly favored
8742 deference to Congress, as did Justice Breyer. But both were also very
8743 sensitive to free speech concerns. And as we strongly believed, there was a
8744 very important free speech argument against these retrospective extensions.
8746 The only vote we could be confident about was that of Justice
8747 Stevens. History will record Justice Stevens as one of the greatest judges
8748 on this Court. His votes are consistently eclectic, which just means that no
8749 simple ideology explains where he will stand. But he had consistently argued
8750 for limits in the context of intellectual property generally. We were fairly
8751 confident he would recognize limits here.
8753 This analysis of "the Rest" showed most clearly where our focus had to be:
8754 on the Conservatives. To win this case, we had to crack open these five and
8755 get at least a majority to go our way. Thus, the single overriding argument
8756 that animated our claim rested on the Conservatives' most important
8757 jurisprudential innovation
—the argument that Judge Sentelle had relied
8758 upon in the Court of Appeals, that Congress's power must be interpreted so
8759 that its enumerated powers have limits.
8762 This then was the core of our strategy
—a strategy for which I am
8763 responsible. We would get the Court to see that just as with the
8764 <em class=
"citetitle">Lopez
</em> case, under the government's argument here,
8765 Congress would always have unlimited power to extend existing terms. If
8766 anything was plain about Congress's power under the Progress Clause, it was
8767 that this power was supposed to be "limited." Our aim would be to get the
8768 Court to reconcile
<em class=
"citetitle">Eldred
</em> with
8769 <em class=
"citetitle">Lopez
</em>: If Congress's power to regulate commerce was
8770 limited, then so, too, must Congress's power to regulate copyright be
8773 The argument on the government's side came down to this: Congress has done
8774 it before. It should be allowed to do it again. The government claimed that
8775 from the very beginning, Congress has been extending the term of existing
8776 copyrights. So, the government argued, the Court should not now say that
8777 practice is unconstitutional.
8779 There was some truth to the government's claim, but not much. We certainly
8780 agreed that Congress had extended existing terms in and in
1909. And of
8781 course, in
1962, Congress began extending existing terms
8782 regularly
—eleven times in forty years.
8785 But this "consistency" should be kept in perspective. Congress extended
8786 existing terms once in the first hundred years of the Republic. It then
8787 extended existing terms once again in the next fifty. Those rare extensions
8788 are in contrast to the now regular practice of extending existing
8789 terms. Whatever restraint Congress had had in the past, that restraint was
8790 now gone. Congress was now in a cycle of extensions; there was no reason to
8791 expect that cycle would end. This Court had not hesitated to intervene where
8792 Congress was in a similar cycle of extension. There was no reason it
8793 couldn't intervene here. Oral argument was scheduled for the first week in
8794 October. I arrived in D.C. two weeks before the argument. During those two
8795 weeks, I was repeatedly "mooted" by lawyers who had volunteered to help in
8796 the case. Such "moots" are basically practice rounds, where wannabe justices
8797 fire questions at wannabe winners.
8799 I was convinced that to win, I had to keep the Court focused on a single
8800 point: that if this extension is permitted, then there is no limit to the
8801 power to set terms. Going with the government would mean that terms would be
8802 effectively unlimited; going with us would give Congress a clear line to
8803 follow: Don't extend existing terms. The moots were an effective practice; I
8804 found ways to take every question back to this central idea.
8805 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2600188"></a><p>
8806 One moot was before the lawyers at Jones Day. Don Ayer was the skeptic. He
8807 had served in the Reagan Justice Department with Solicitor General Charles
8808 Fried. He had argued many cases before the Supreme Court. And in his review
8809 of the moot, he let his concern speak:
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2600201"></a>
8811 "I'm just afraid that unless they really see the harm, they won't be willing
8812 to upset this practice that the government says has been a consistent
8813 practice for two hundred years. You have to make them see the
8814 harm
—passionately get them to see the harm. For if they don't see
8815 that, then we haven't any chance of winning."
8816 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2600210"></a><p>
8818 He may have argued many cases before this Court, I thought, but he didn't
8819 understand its soul. As a clerk, I had seen the Justices do the right
8820 thing
—not because of politics but because it was right. As a law
8821 professor, I had spent my life teaching my students that this Court does the
8822 right thing
—not because of politics but because it is right. As I
8823 listened to Ayer's plea for passion in pressing politics, I understood his
8824 point, and I rejected it. Our argument was right. That was enough. Let the
8825 politicians learn to see that it was also good. The night before the
8826 argument, a line of people began to form in front of the Supreme Court. The
8827 case had become a focus of the press and of the movement to free
8828 culture. Hundreds stood in line for the chance to see the
8829 proceedings. Scores spent the night on the Supreme Court steps so that they
8830 would be assured a seat.
8832 Not everyone has to wait in line. People who know the Justices can ask for
8833 seats they control. (I asked Justice Scalia's chambers for seats for my
8834 parents, for example.) Members of the Supreme Court bar can get a seat in a
8835 special section reserved for them. And senators and congressmen have a
8836 special place where they get to sit, too. And finally, of course, the press
8837 has a gallery, as do clerks working for the Justices on the Court. As we
8838 entered that morning, there was no place that was not taken. This was an
8839 argument about intellectual property law, yet the halls were filled. As I
8840 walked in to take my seat at the front of the Court, I saw my parents
8841 sitting on the left. As I sat down at the table, I saw Jack Valenti sitting
8842 in the special section ordinarily reserved for family of the Justices.
8844 When the Chief Justice called me to begin my argument, I began where I
8845 intended to stay: on the question of the limits on Congress's power. This
8846 was a case about enumerated powers, I said, and whether those enumerated
8847 powers had any limit.
8849 Justice O'Connor stopped me within one minute of my opening. The history
8851 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
8852 justice o'connor: Congress has extended the term so often through the years,
8853 and if you are right, don't we run the risk of upsetting previous extensions
8854 of time? I mean, this seems to be a practice that began with the very first
8856 </p></blockquote></div><p>
8857 She was quite willing to concede "that this flies directly in the face of
8858 what the framers had in mind." But my response again and again was to
8859 emphasize limits on Congress's power.
8860 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
8862 mr. lessig: Well, if it flies in the face of what the framers had in mind,
8863 then the question is, is there a way of interpreting their words that gives
8864 effect to what they had in mind, and the answer is yes.
8865 </p></blockquote></div><p>
8866 There were two points in this argument when I should have seen where the
8867 Court was going. The first was a question by Justice Kennedy, who observed,
8868 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
8869 justice kennedy: Well, I suppose implicit in the argument that the '
76 act,
8870 too, should have been declared void, and that we might leave it alone
8871 because of the disruption, is that for all these years the act has impeded
8872 progress in science and the useful arts. I just don't see any empirical
8874 </p></blockquote></div><p>
8875 Here follows my clear mistake. Like a professor correcting a student, I
8877 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
8878 mr. lessig: Justice, we are not making an empirical claim at all. Nothing
8879 in our Copyright Clause claim hangs upon the empirical assertion about
8880 impeding progress. Our only argument is this is a structural limit necessary
8881 to assure that what would be an effectively perpetual term not be permitted
8882 under the copyright laws.
8883 </p></blockquote></div><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2600337"></a><p>
8884 That was a correct answer, but it wasn't the right answer. The right answer
8885 was instead that there was an obvious and profound harm. Any number of
8886 briefs had been written about it. He wanted to hear it. And here was the
8887 place Don Ayer's advice should have mattered. This was a softball; my answer
8888 was a swing and a miss.
8890 The second came from the Chief, for whom the whole case had been
8891 crafted. For the Chief Justice had crafted the
<em class=
"citetitle">Lopez
</em>
8892 ruling, and we hoped that he would see this case as its second cousin.
8895 It was clear a second into his question that he wasn't at all sympathetic.
8896 To him, we were a bunch of anarchists. As he asked:
8899 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
8900 chief justice: Well, but you want more than that. You want the right to copy
8901 verbatim other people's books, don't you?
8903 mr. lessig: We want the right to copy verbatim works that should be in the
8904 public domain and would be in the public domain but for a statute that
8905 cannot be justified under ordinary First Amendment analysis or under a
8906 proper reading of the limits built into the Copyright Clause.
8907 </p></blockquote></div><p>
8908 Things went better for us when the government gave its argument; for now the
8909 Court picked up on the core of our claim. As Justice Scalia asked Solicitor
8911 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
8912 justice scalia: You say that the functional equivalent of an unlimited time
8913 would be a violation [of the Constitution], but that's precisely the
8914 argument that's being made by petitioners here, that a limited time which is
8915 extendable is the functional equivalent of an unlimited time.
8916 </p></blockquote></div><p>
8917 When Olson was finished, it was my turn to give a closing rebuttal. Olson's
8918 flailing had revived my anger. But my anger still was directed to the
8919 academic, not the practical. The government was arguing as if this were the
8920 first case ever to consider limits on Congress's Copyright and Patent Clause
8921 power. Ever the professor and not the advocate, I closed by pointing out the
8922 long history of the Court imposing limits on Congress's power in the name of
8923 the Copyright and Patent Clause
— indeed, the very first case striking
8924 a law of Congress as exceeding a specific enumerated power was based upon
8925 the Copyright and Patent Clause. All true. But it wasn't going to move the
8929 As I left the court that day, I knew there were a hundred points I wished I
8930 could remake. There were a hundred questions I wished I had answered
8931 differently. But one way of thinking about this case left me optimistic.
8933 The government had been asked over and over again, what is the limit? Over
8934 and over again, it had answered there is no limit. This was precisely the
8935 answer I wanted the Court to hear. For I could not imagine how the Court
8936 could understand that the government believed Congress's power was unlimited
8937 under the terms of the Copyright Clause, and sustain the government's
8938 argument. The solicitor general had made my argument for me. No matter how
8939 often I tried, I could not understand how the Court could find that
8940 Congress's power under the Commerce Clause was limited, but under the
8941 Copyright Clause, unlimited. In those rare moments when I let myself believe
8942 that we may have prevailed, it was because I felt this Court
—in
8943 particular, the Conservatives
—would feel itself constrained by the
8944 rule of law that it had established elsewhere.
8946 The morning of January
15,
2003, I was five minutes late to the office and
8947 missed the
7:
00 A.M. call from the Supreme Court clerk. Listening to the
8948 message, I could tell in an instant that she had bad news to report.The
8949 Supreme Court had affirmed the decision of the Court of Appeals. Seven
8950 justices had voted in the majority. There were two dissents.
8952 A few seconds later, the opinions arrived by e-mail. I took the phone off
8953 the hook, posted an announcement to our blog, and sat down to see where I
8954 had been wrong in my reasoning.
8956 My
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>reasoning
</em></span>. Here was a case that pitted all the money
8957 in the world against
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>reasoning
</em></span>. And here was the last
8958 naïve law professor, scouring the pages, looking for reasoning.
8960 I first scoured the opinion, looking for how the Court would distinguish the
8961 principle in this case from the principle in
8962 <em class=
"citetitle">Lopez
</em>. The argument was nowhere to be found. The case
8963 was not even cited. The argument that was the core argument of our case did
8964 not even appear in the Court's opinion.
8969 Justice Ginsburg simply ignored the enumerated powers argument. Consistent
8970 with her view that Congress's power was not limited generally, she had found
8971 Congress's power not limited here.
8973 Her opinion was perfectly reasonable
—for her, and for Justice
8974 Souter. Neither believes in
<em class=
"citetitle">Lopez
</em>. It would be too
8975 much to expect them to write an opinion that recognized, much less
8976 explained, the doctrine they had worked so hard to defeat.
8978 But as I realized what had happened, I couldn't quite believe what I was
8979 reading. I had said there was no way this Court could reconcile limited
8980 powers with the Commerce Clause and unlimited powers with the Progress
8981 Clause. It had never even occurred to me that they could reconcile the two
8982 simply
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>by not addressing the argument
</em></span>. There was no
8983 inconsistency because they would not talk about the two together. There was
8984 therefore no principle that followed from the
<em class=
"citetitle">Lopez
</em>
8985 case: In that context, Congress's power would be limited, but in this
8986 context it would not.
8988 Yet by what right did they get to choose which of the framers' values they
8989 would respect? By what right did they
—the silent five
—get to
8990 select the part of the Constitution they would enforce based on the values
8991 they thought important? We were right back to the argument that I said I
8992 hated at the start: I had failed to convince them that the issue here was
8993 important, and I had failed to recognize that however much I might hate a
8994 system in which the Court gets to pick the constitutional values that it
8995 will respect, that is the system we have.
8996 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2600527"></a><p>
8997 Justices Breyer and Stevens wrote very strong dissents. Stevens's opinion
8998 was crafted internal to the law: He argued that the tradition of
8999 intellectual property law should not support this unjustified extension of
9000 terms. He based his argument on a parallel analysis that had governed in the
9001 context of patents (so had we). But the rest of the Court discounted the
9002 parallel
—without explaining how the very same words in the Progress
9003 Clause could come to mean totally different things depending upon whether
9004 the words were about patents or copyrights. The Court let Justice Stevens's
9005 charge go unanswered.
9006 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2600546"></a><p>
9009 Justice Breyer's opinion, perhaps the best opinion he has ever written, was
9010 external to the Constitution. He argued that the term of copyrights has
9011 become so long as to be effectively unlimited. We had said that under the
9012 current term, a copyright gave an author
99.8 percent of the value of a
9013 perpetual term. Breyer said we were wrong, that the actual number was
9014 99.9997 percent of a perpetual term. Either way, the point was clear: If the
9015 Constitution said a term had to be "limited," and the existing term was so
9016 long as to be effectively unlimited, then it was unconstitutional.
9018 These two justices understood all the arguments we had made. But because
9019 neither believed in the
<em class=
"citetitle">Lopez
</em> case, neither was
9020 willing to push it as a reason to reject this extension. The case was
9021 decided without anyone having addressed the argument that we had carried
9022 from Judge Sentelle. It was
<em class=
"citetitle">Hamlet
</em> without the
9025 Defeat brings depression. They say it is a sign of health when depression
9026 gives way to anger. My anger came quickly, but it didn't cure the
9027 depression. This anger was of two sorts.
9029 It was first anger with the five "Conservatives." It would have been one
9030 thing for them to have explained why the principle of
9031 <em class=
"citetitle">Lopez
</em> didn't apply in this case. That wouldn't have
9032 been a very convincing argument, I don't believe, having read it made by
9033 others, and having tried to make it myself. But it at least would have been
9034 an act of integrity. These justices in particular have repeatedly said that
9035 the proper mode of interpreting the Constitution is "originalism"
—to
9036 first understand the framers' text, interpreted in their context, in light
9037 of the structure of the Constitution. That method had produced
9038 <em class=
"citetitle">Lopez
</em> and many other "originalist" rulings. Where was
9039 their "originalism" now?
9042 Here, they had joined an opinion that never once tried to explain what the
9043 framers had meant by crafting the Progress Clause as they did; they joined
9044 an opinion that never once tried to explain how the structure of that clause
9045 would affect the interpretation of Congress's power. And they joined an
9046 opinion that didn't even try to explain why this grant of power could be
9047 unlimited, whereas the Commerce Clause would be limited. In short, they had
9048 joined an opinion that did not apply to, and was inconsistent with, their
9049 own method for interpreting the Constitution. This opinion may well have
9050 yielded a result that they liked. It did not produce a reason that was
9051 consistent with their own principles.
9053 My anger with the Conservatives quickly yielded to anger with myself. For I
9054 had let a view of the law that I liked interfere with a view of the law as
9056 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2600646"></a><p>
9057 Most lawyers, and most law professors, have little patience for idealism
9058 about courts in general and this Supreme Court in particular. Most have a
9059 much more pragmatic view. When Don Ayer said that this case would be won
9060 based on whether I could convince the Justices that the framers' values were
9061 important, I fought the idea, because I didn't want to believe that that is
9062 how this Court decides. I insisted on arguing this case as if it were a
9063 simple application of a set of principles. I had an argument that followed
9064 in logic. I didn't need to waste my time showing it should also follow in
9068 As I read back over the transcript from that argument in October, I can see
9069 a hundred places where the answers could have taken the conversation in
9070 different directions, where the truth about the harm that this unchecked
9071 power will cause could have been made clear to this Court. Justice Kennedy
9072 in good faith wanted to be shown. I, idiotically, corrected his
9073 question. Justice Souter in good faith wanted to be shown the First
9074 Amendment harms. I, like a math teacher, reframed the question to make the
9075 logical point. I had shown them how they could strike this law of Congress
9076 if they wanted to. There were a hundred places where I could have helped
9077 them want to, yet my stubbornness, my refusal to give in, stopped me. I have
9078 stood before hundreds of audiences trying to persuade; I have used passion
9079 in that effort to persuade; but I refused to stand before this audience and
9080 try to persuade with the passion I had used elsewhere. It was not the basis
9081 on which a court should decide the issue.
9082 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2600688"></a><p>
9083 Would it have been different if I had argued it differently? Would it have
9084 been different if Don Ayer had argued it? Or Charles Fried? Or Kathleen
9085 Sullivan?
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2600699"></a>
9087 My friends huddled around me to insist it would not. The Court was not
9088 ready, my friends insisted. This was a loss that was destined. It would take
9089 a great deal more to show our society why our framers were right. And when
9090 we do that, we will be able to show that Court.
9092 Maybe, but I doubt it. These Justices have no financial interest in doing
9093 anything except the right thing. They are not lobbied. They have little
9094 reason to resist doing right. I can't help but think that if I had stepped
9095 down from this pretty picture of dispassionate justice, I could have
9098 And even if I couldn't, then that doesn't excuse what happened in
9099 January. For at the start of this case, one of America's leading
9100 intellectual property professors stated publicly that my bringing this case
9101 was a mistake. "The Court is not ready," Peter Jaszi said; this issue should
9102 not be raised until it is.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2600730"></a>
9105 After the argument and after the decision, Peter said to me, and publicly,
9106 that he was wrong. But if indeed that Court could not have been persuaded,
9107 then that is all the evidence that's needed to know that here again Peter
9108 was right. Either I was not ready to argue this case in a way that would do
9109 some good or they were not ready to hear this case in a way that would do
9110 some good. Either way, the decision to bring this case
—a decision I
9111 had made four years before
—was wrong. While the reaction to the Sonny
9112 Bono Act itself was almost unanimously negative, the reaction to the Court's
9113 decision was mixed. No one, at least in the press, tried to say that
9114 extending the term of copyright was a good idea. We had won that battle over
9115 ideas. Where the decision was praised, it was praised by papers that had
9116 been skeptical of the Court's activism in other cases. Deference was a good
9117 thing, even if it left standing a silly law. But where the decision was
9118 attacked, it was attacked because it left standing a silly and harmful
9119 law.
<em class=
"citetitle">The New York Times
</em> wrote in its editorial,
9120 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
9121 In effect, the Supreme Court's decision makes it likely that we are seeing
9122 the beginning of the end of public domain and the birth of copyright
9123 perpetuity. The public domain has been a grand experiment, one that should
9124 not be allowed to die. The ability to draw freely on the entire creative
9125 output of humanity is one of the reasons we live in a time of such fruitful
9127 </p></blockquote></div><p>
9128 The best responses were in the cartoons. There was a gaggle of hilarious
9129 images
—of Mickey in jail and the like. The best, from my view of the
9130 case, was Ruben Bolling's, reproduced on the next page. The "powerful and
9131 wealthy" line is a bit unfair. But the punch in the face felt exactly like
9132 that.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2600614"></a>
9134 The image that will always stick in my head is that evoked by the quote from
9135 <em class=
"citetitle">The New York Times
</em>. That "grand experiment" we call
9136 the "public domain" is over? When I can make light of it, I think, "Honey, I
9137 shrunk the Constitution." But I can rarely make light of it. We had in our
9138 Constitution a commitment to free culture. In the case that I fathered, the
9139 Supreme Court effectively renounced that commitment. A better lawyer would
9140 have made them see differently.
9141 </p><div class=
"footnotes"><br><hr width=
"100" align=
"left"><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2598507" href=
"#id2598507" class=
"para">179</a>]
</sup>
9144 There's a parallel here with pornography that is a bit hard to describe, but
9145 it's a strong one. One phenomenon that the Internet created was a world of
9146 noncommercial pornographers
—people who were distributing porn but were
9147 not making money directly or indirectly from that distribution. Such a
9148 class didn't exist before the Internet came into being because the costs of
9149 distributing porn were so high. Yet this new class of distributors got
9150 special attention in the Supreme Court, when the Court struck down the
9151 Communications Decency Act of
1996. It was partly because of the burden on
9152 noncommercial speakers that the statute was found to exceed Congress's
9153 power. The same point could have been made about noncommercial publishers
9154 after the advent of the Internet. The Eric Eldreds of the world before the
9155 Internet were extremely few. Yet one would think it at least as important to
9156 protect the Eldreds of the world as to protect noncommercial pornographers.
</p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2598556" href=
"#id2598556" class=
"para">180</a>]
</sup>
9159 The full text is: "Sonny [Bono] wanted the term of copyright protection to
9160 last forever. I am informed by staff that such a change would violate the
9161 Constitution. I invite all of you to work with me to strengthen our
9162 copyright laws in all of the ways available to us. As you know, there is
9163 also Jack Valenti's proposal for a term to last forever less one
9164 day. Perhaps the Committee may look at that next Congress,"
144
9165 Cong. Rec. H9946,
9951-
2 (October
7,
1998).
9166 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2598783" href=
"#id2598783" class=
"para">181</a>]
</sup>
9168 Associated Press, "Disney Lobbying for Copyright Extension No Mickey Mouse
9169 Effort; Congress OKs Bill Granting Creators
20 More Years,"
9170 <em class=
"citetitle">Chicago Tribune
</em>,
17 October
1998,
22.
9171 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2598798" href=
"#id2598798" class=
"para">182</a>]
</sup>
9173 Se Nick Brown, "Fair Use No More?: Copyright in the Information Age,"
9174 tilgjengelig fra
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link
9176 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2598812" href=
"#id2598812" class=
"para">183</a>]
</sup>
9179 Alan K. Ota, "Disney in Washington: The Mouse That Roars,"
9180 <em class=
"citetitle">Congressional Quarterly This Week
</em>,
8 August
1990,
9181 available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
50</a>.
9182 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2598903" href=
"#id2598903" class=
"para">184</a>]
</sup>
9184 <em class=
"citetitle">United States
</em> v.
<em class=
"citetitle">Lopez
</em>,
514
9185 U.S.
549,
564 (
1995).
9186 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2598930" href=
"#id2598930" class=
"para">185</a>]
</sup>
9189 <em class=
"citetitle">United States
</em> v.
<em class=
"citetitle">Morrison
</em>,
529
9191 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2598950" href=
"#id2598950" class=
"para">186</a>]
</sup>
9194 If it is a principle about enumerated powers, then the principle carries
9195 from one enumerated power to another. The animating point in the context of
9196 the Commerce Clause was that the interpretation offered by the government
9197 would allow the government unending power to regulate commerce
—the
9198 limitation to interstate commerce notwithstanding. The same point is true in
9199 the context of the Copyright Clause. Here, too, the government's
9200 interpretation would allow the government unending power to regulate
9201 copyrights
—the limitation to "limited times" notwithstanding.
9202 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2599029" href=
"#id2599029" class=
"para">187</a>]
</sup>
9205 Brief of the Nashville Songwriters Association,
9206 <em class=
"citetitle">Eldred
</em> v.
<em class=
"citetitle">Ashcroft
</em>,
537 U.S.
9207 186 (
2003) (No.
01-
618), n
.10, available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
51</a>.
9208 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2599088" href=
"#id2599088" class=
"para">188</a>]
</sup>
9210 The figure of
2 percent is an extrapolation from the study by the
9211 Congressional Research Service, in light of the estimated renewal
9212 ranges. See Brief of Petitioners,
<em class=
"citetitle">Eldred
</em>
9213 v.
<em class=
"citetitle">Ashcroft
</em>,
7, available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
52</a>.
9214 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2599232" href=
"#id2599232" class=
"para">189</a>]
</sup>
9217 See David G. Savage, "High Court Scene of Showdown on Copyright Law,"
9218 <em class=
"citetitle">Los Angeles Times
</em>,
6 October
2002; David Streitfeld,
9219 "Classic Movies, Songs, Books at Stake; Supreme Court Hears Arguments Today
9220 on Striking Down Copyright Extension,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Orlando Sentinel
9221 Tribune
</em>,
9 October
2002.
9222 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2599286" href=
"#id2599286" class=
"para">190</a>]
</sup>
9225 Brief of Hal Roach Studios and Michael Agee as Amicus Curiae Supporting the
9226 Petitoners,
<em class=
"citetitle">Eldred
</em>
9227 v.
<em class=
"citetitle">Ashcroft
</em>,
537 U.S.
186 (
2003) (No.
01-
618),
9228 12. See also Brief of Amicus Curiae filed on behalf of Petitioners by the
9229 Internet Archive,
<em class=
"citetitle">Eldred
</em>
9230 v.
<em class=
"citetitle">Ashcroft
</em>, available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
53</a>.
9231 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2599516" href=
"#id2599516" class=
"para">191</a>]
</sup>
9234 Jason Schultz, "The Myth of the
1976 Copyright `Chaos' Theory,"
20 December
9235 2002, tilgjengelig fra
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link
9237 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2599941" href=
"#id2599941" class=
"para">192</a>]
</sup>
9240 Brief of Amici Dr. Seuss Enterprise et al.,
<em class=
"citetitle">Eldred
</em>
9241 v.
<em class=
"citetitle">Ashcroft
</em>,
537 U.S. (
2003) (No.
01-
618),
19.
9242 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2599966" href=
"#id2599966" class=
"para">193</a>]
</sup>
9245 Dinitia Smith, "Immortal Words, Immortal Royalties? Even Mickey Mouse Joins
9246 the Fray,"
<em class=
"citetitle">New York Times
</em>,
28 March
1998, B7.
9247 </p></div></div></div><div class=
"chapter" title=
"Kapittel 15. Kapittel fjorten: Eldred II"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h2 class=
"title"><a name=
"eldred-ii"></a>Kapittel
15. Kapittel fjorten: Eldred II
</h2></div></div></div><p>
9248 The day
<em class=
"citetitle">Eldred
</em> was decided, fate would have it that I
9249 was to travel to Washington, D.C. (The day the rehearing petition in
9250 <em class=
"citetitle">Eldred
</em> was denied
—meaning the case was really
9251 finally over
—fate would have it that I was giving a speech to
9252 technologists at Disney World.) This was a particularly long flight to my
9253 least favorite city. The drive into the city from Dulles was delayed because
9254 of traffic, so I opened up my computer and wrote an op-ed piece.
9255 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2600827"></a><p>
9256 It was an act of contrition. During the whole of the flight from San
9257 Francisco to Washington, I had heard over and over again in my head the same
9258 advice from Don Ayer: You need to make them see why it is important. And
9259 alternating with that command was the question of Justice Kennedy: "For all
9260 these years the act has impeded progress in science and the useful arts. I
9261 just don't see any empirical evidence for that." And so, having failed in
9262 the argument of constitutional principle, finally, I turned to an argument
9266 <em class=
"citetitle">The New York Times
</em> published the piece. In it, I
9267 proposed a simple fix: Fifty years after a work has been published, the
9268 copyright owner would be required to register the work and pay a small
9269 fee. If he paid the fee, he got the benefit of the full term of
9270 copyright. If he did not, the work passed into the public domain.
9272 We called this the Eldred Act, but that was just to give it a name. Eric
9273 Eldred was kind enough to let his name be used once again, but as he said
9274 early on, it won't get passed unless it has another name.
9276 Or another two names. For depending upon your perspective, this is either
9277 the "Public Domain Enhancement Act" or the "Copyright Term Deregulation
9278 Act." Either way, the essence of the idea is clear and obvious: Remove
9279 copyright where it is doing nothing except blocking access and the spread of
9280 knowledge. Leave it for as long as Congress allows for those works where its
9281 worth is at least $
1. But for everything else, let the content go.
9282 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2600892"></a><p>
9283 The reaction to this idea was amazingly strong. Steve Forbes endorsed it in
9284 an editorial. I received an avalanche of e-mail and letters expressing
9285 support. When you focus the issue on lost creativity, people can see the
9286 copyright system makes no sense. As a good Republican might say, here
9287 government regulation is simply getting in the way of innovation and
9288 creativity. And as a good Democrat might say, here the government is
9289 blocking access and the spread of knowledge for no good reason. Indeed,
9290 there is no real difference between Democrats and Republicans on this
9291 issue. Anyone can recognize the stupid harm of the present system.
9293 Indeed, many recognized the obvious benefit of the registration
9294 requirement. For one of the hardest things about the current system for
9295 people who want to license content is that there is no obvious place to look
9296 for the current copyright owners. Since registration is not required, since
9297 marking content is not required, since no formality at all is required, it
9298 is often impossibly hard to locate copyright owners to ask permission to use
9299 or license their work. This system would lower these costs, by establishing
9300 at least one registry where copyright owners could be identified.
9301 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2600926"></a><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2600932"></a><p>
9303 As I described in chapter
10, formalities in copyright law were removed in
9304 1976, when Congress followed the Europeans by abandoning any formal
9305 requirement before a copyright is granted.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2600944" href=
"#ftn.id2600944" class=
"footnote">194</a>]
</sup> The Europeans are said to view copyright as a "natural right."
9306 Natural rights don't need forms to exist. Traditions, like the
9307 Anglo-American tradition that required copyright owners to follow form if
9308 their rights were to be protected, did not, the Europeans thought, properly
9309 respect the dignity of the author. My right as a creator turns on my
9310 creativity, not upon the special favor of the government.
9312 That's great rhetoric. It sounds wonderfully romantic. But it is absurd
9313 copyright policy. It is absurd especially for authors, because a world
9314 without formalities harms the creator. The ability to spread "Walt Disney
9315 creativity" is destroyed when there is no simple way to know what's
9316 protected and what's not.
9317 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2600992"></a><p>
9318 The fight against formalities achieved its first real victory in Berlin in
9319 1908. International copyright lawyers amended the Berne Convention in
1908,
9320 to require copyright terms of life plus fifty years, as well as the
9321 abolition of copyright formalities. The formalities were hated because the
9322 stories of inadvertent loss were increasingly common. It was as if a Charles
9323 Dickens character ran all copyright offices, and the failure to dot an
9324 <em class=
"citetitle">i
</em> or cross a
<em class=
"citetitle">t
</em> resulted in the
9325 loss of widows' only income.
9327 These complaints were real and sensible. And the strictness of the
9328 formalities, especially in the United States, was absurd. The law should
9329 always have ways of forgiving innocent mistakes. There is no reason
9330 copyright law couldn't, as well. Rather than abandoning formalities totally,
9331 the response in Berlin should have been to embrace a more equitable system
9334 Even that would have been resisted, however, because registration in the
9335 nineteenth and twentieth centuries was still expensive. It was also a
9336 hassle. The abolishment of formalities promised not only to save the
9337 starving widows, but also to lighten an unnecessary regulatory burden
9338 imposed upon creators.
9341 In addition to the practical complaint of authors in
1908, there was a moral
9342 claim as well. There was no reason that creative property should be a
9343 second-class form of property. If a carpenter builds a table, his rights
9344 over the table don't depend upon filing a form with the government. He has
9345 a property right over the table "naturally," and he can assert that right
9346 against anyone who would steal the table, whether or not he has informed the
9347 government of his ownership of the table.
9349 This argument is correct, but its implications are misleading. For the
9350 argument in favor of formalities does not depend upon creative property
9351 being second-class property. The argument in favor of formalities turns upon
9352 the special problems that creative property presents. The law of
9353 formalities responds to the special physics of creative property, to assure
9354 that it can be efficiently and fairly spread.
9356 No one thinks, for example, that land is second-class property just because
9357 you have to register a deed with a court if your sale of land is to be
9358 effective. And few would think a car is second-class property just because
9359 you must register the car with the state and tag it with a license. In both
9360 of those cases, everyone sees that there is an important reason to secure
9361 registration
—both because it makes the markets more efficient and
9362 because it better secures the rights of the owner. Without a registration
9363 system for land, landowners would perpetually have to guard their
9364 property. With registration, they can simply point the police to a
9365 deed. Without a registration system for cars, auto theft would be much
9366 easier. With a registration system, the thief has a high burden to sell a
9367 stolen car. A slight burden is placed on the property owner, but those
9368 burdens produce a much better system of protection for property generally.
9370 It is similarly special physics that makes formalities important in
9371 copyright law. Unlike a carpenter's table, there's nothing in nature that
9372 makes it relatively obvious who might own a particular bit of creative
9373 property. A recording of Lyle Lovett's latest album can exist in a billion
9374 places without anything necessarily linking it back to a particular
9375 owner. And like a car, there's no way to buy and sell creative property with
9376 confidence unless there is some simple way to authenticate who is the author
9377 and what rights he has. Simple transactions are destroyed in a world without
9378 formalities. Complex, expensive,
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>lawyer
</em></span> transactions
9379 take their place.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2601065"></a>
9381 This was the understanding of the problem with the Sonny Bono Act that we
9382 tried to demonstrate to the Court. This was the part it didn't "get."
9383 Because we live in a system without formalities, there is no way easily to
9384 build upon or use culture from our past. If copyright terms were, as Justice
9385 Story said they would be, "short," then this wouldn't matter much. For
9386 fourteen years, under the framers' system, a work would be presumptively
9387 controlled. After fourteen years, it would be presumptively uncontrolled.
9389 But now that copyrights can be just about a century long, the inability to
9390 know what is protected and what is not protected becomes a huge and obvious
9391 burden on the creative process. If the only way a library can offer an
9392 Internet exhibit about the New Deal is to hire a lawyer to clear the rights
9393 to every image and sound, then the copyright system is burdening creativity
9394 in a way that has never been seen before
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>because there are no
9395 formalities
</em></span>.
9397 The Eldred Act was designed to respond to exactly this problem. If it is
9398 worth $
1 to you, then register your work and you can get the longer
9399 term. Others will know how to contact you and, therefore, how to get your
9400 permission if they want to use your work. And you will get the benefit of an
9401 extended copyright term.
9403 If it isn't worth it to you to register to get the benefit of an extended
9404 term, then it shouldn't be worth it for the government to defend your
9405 monopoly over that work either. The work should pass into the public domain
9406 where anyone can copy it, or build archives with it, or create a movie based
9407 on it. It should become free if it is not worth $
1 to you.
9409 Noen bekymrer seg over byrden på forfattere. Gjør ikke byrden med å
9410 registrere verket at beløpet $
1 egentlig er misvisende? Er ikke
9411 ekstraarbeidet verdt mer enn $
1? Er ikke dette det virkelige problemet med
9415 It is. The hassle is terrible. The system that exists now is awful. I
9416 completely agree that the Copyright Office has done a terrible job (no doubt
9417 because they are terribly funded) in enabling simple and cheap
9418 registrations. Any real solution to the problem of formalities must address
9419 the real problem of
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>governments
</em></span> standing at the core of
9420 any system of formalities. In this book, I offer such a solution. That
9421 solution essentially remakes the Copyright Office. For now, assume it was
9422 Amazon that ran the registration system. Assume it was one-click
9423 registration. The Eldred Act would propose a simple, one-click registration
9424 fifty years after a work was published. Based upon historical data, that
9425 system would move up to
98 percent of commercial work, commercial work that
9426 no longer had a commercial life, into the public domain within fifty
9427 years. What do you think?
9428 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2601180"></a><p>
9429 Da Steve Forbes støttet idéen, begynte enkelte i Washington å følge
9430 med. Mange kontaktet meg med tips til representanter som kan være villig til
9431 å introdusere en Eldred-lov. og jeg hadde noen få som foreslo direkte at de
9432 kan være villige til å ta det første skrittet.
9434 En representant, Zoe Lofgren fra California, gikk så langt som å få
9435 lovforslaget utarbeidet. Utkastet løste noen problemer med internasjonal
9436 lov. Det påla de enklest mulige forutsetninger på innehaverne av
9437 opphavsretter. I mai
2003 så det ut som om loven skulle være introdusert.
9438 16. mai, postet jeg på Eldred Act-bloggen, "vi er nære". Det oppstod en
9439 generell reaksjon i blogg-samfunnet om at noe godt kunne skje her.
9440 <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2601213"></a>
9442 But at this stage, the lobbyists began to intervene. Jack Valenti and the
9443 MPAA general counsel came to the congresswoman's office to give the view of
9444 the MPAA. Aided by his lawyer, as Valenti told me, Valenti informed the
9445 congresswoman that the MPAA would oppose the Eldred Act. The reasons are
9446 embarrassingly thin. More importantly, their thinness shows something clear
9447 about what this debate is really about.
9450 The MPAA argued first that Congress had "firmly rejected the central concept
9451 in the proposed bill"
—that copyrights be renewed. That was true, but
9452 irrelevant, as Congress's "firm rejection" had occurred long before the
9453 Internet made subsequent uses much more likely. Second, they argued that
9454 the proposal would harm poor copyright owners
—apparently those who
9455 could not afford the $
1 fee. Third, they argued that Congress had determined
9456 that extending a copyright term would encourage restoration work. Maybe in
9457 the case of the small percentage of work covered by copyright law that is
9458 still commercially valuable, but again this was irrelevant, as the proposal
9459 would not cut off the extended term unless the $
1 fee was not paid. Fourth,
9460 the MPAA argued that the bill would impose "enormous" costs, since a
9461 registration system is not free. True enough, but those costs are certainly
9462 less than the costs of clearing the rights for a copyright whose owner is
9463 not known. Fifth, they worried about the risks if the copyright to a story
9464 underlying a film were to pass into the public domain. But what risk is
9465 that? If it is in the public domain, then the film is a valid derivative
9468 Finally, the MPAA argued that existing law enabled copyright owners to do
9469 this if they wanted. But the whole point is that there are thousands of
9470 copyright owners who don't even know they have a copyright to give. Whether
9471 they are free to give away their copyright or not
—a controversial
9472 claim in any case
—unless they know about a copyright, they're not
9475 At the beginning of this book, I told two stories about the law reacting to
9476 changes in technology. In the one, common sense prevailed. In the other,
9477 common sense was delayed. The difference between the two stories was the
9478 power of the opposition
—the power of the side that fought to defend
9479 the status quo. In both cases, a new technology threatened old
9480 interests. But in only one case did those interest's have the power to
9481 protect themselves against this new competitive threat.
9483 Jeg brukte disse to tilfellene som en måte å ramme inn krigen som denne
9484 boken har handlet om. For her er det også en ny teknologi som tvinger loven
9485 til å reagere. Og her bør vi også spørre, er loven i tråd med eller i strid
9486 med sunn fornuft. Hvis sunn fornuft støtter loven, hva forklarer denne
9492 When the issue is piracy, it is right for the law to back the copyright
9493 owners. The commercial piracy that I described is wrong and harmful, and the
9494 law should work to eliminate it. When the issue is p2p sharing, it is easy
9495 to understand why the law backs the owners still: Much of this sharing is
9496 wrong, even if much is harmless. When the issue is copyright terms for the
9497 Mickey Mouses of the world, it is possible still to understand why the law
9498 favors Hollywood: Most people don't recognize the reasons for limiting
9499 copyright terms; it is thus still possible to see good faith within the
9502 But when the copyright owners oppose a proposal such as the Eldred Act,
9503 then, finally, there is an example that lays bare the naked selfinterest
9504 driving this war. This act would free an extraordinary range of content that
9505 is otherwise unused. It wouldn't interfere with any copyright owner's desire
9506 to exercise continued control over his content. It would simply liberate
9507 what Kevin Kelly calls the "Dark Content" that fills archives around the
9508 world. So when the warriors oppose a change like this, we should ask one
9511 Hva ønsker denne industrien egentlig?
9513 With very little effort, the warriors could protect their content. So the
9514 effort to block something like the Eldred Act is not really about protecting
9515 <span class=
"emphasis"><em>their
</em></span> content. The effort to block the Eldred Act is an
9516 effort to assure that nothing more passes into the public domain. It is
9517 another step to assure that the public domain will never compete, that there
9518 will be no use of content that is not commercially controlled, and that
9519 there will be no commercial use of content that doesn't require
9520 <span class=
"emphasis"><em>their
</em></span> permission first.
9522 The opposition to the Eldred Act reveals how extreme the other side is. The
9523 most powerful and sexy and well loved of lobbies really has as its aim not
9524 the protection of "property" but the rejection of a tradition. Their aim is
9525 not simply to protect what is theirs.
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>Their aim is to assure that
9526 all there is is what is theirs
</em></span>.
9529 It is not hard to understand why the warriors take this view. It is not hard
9530 to see why it would benefit them if the competition of the public domain
9531 tied to the Internet could somehow be quashed. Just as RCA feared the
9532 competition of FM, they fear the competition of a public domain connected to
9533 a public that now has the means to create with it and to share its own
9535 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2601376"></a><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2601382"></a><p>
9536 What is hard to understand is why the public takes this view. It is as if
9537 the law made airplanes trespassers. The MPAA stands with the Causbys and
9538 demands that their remote and useless property rights be respected, so that
9539 these remote and forgotten copyright holders might block the progress of
9542 All this seems to follow easily from this untroubled acceptance of the
9543 "property" in intellectual property. Common sense supports it, and so long
9544 as it does, the assaults will rain down upon the technologies of the
9545 Internet. The consequence will be an increasing "permission society." The
9546 past can be cultivated only if you can identify the owner and gain
9547 permission to build upon his work. The future will be controlled by this
9548 dead (and often unfindable) hand of the past.
9549 </p><div class=
"footnotes"><br><hr width=
"100" align=
"left"><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2600944" href=
"#id2600944" class=
"para">194</a>]
</sup>
9552 Until the
1908 Berlin Act of the Berne Convention, national copyright
9553 legislation sometimes made protection depend upon compliance with
9554 formalities such as registration, deposit, and affixation of notice of the
9555 author's claim of copyright. However, starting with the
1908 act, every text
9556 of the Convention has provided that "the enjoyment and the exercise" of
9557 rights guaranteed by the Convention "shall not be subject to any formality."
9558 The prohibition against formalities is presently embodied in Article
5(
2) of
9559 the Paris Text of the Berne Convention. Many countries continue to impose
9560 some form of deposit or registration requirement, albeit not as a condition
9561 of copyright. French law, for example, requires the deposit of copies of
9562 works in national repositories, principally the National Museum. Copies of
9563 books published in the United Kingdom must be deposited in the British
9564 Library. The German Copyright Act provides for a Registrar of Authors where
9565 the author's true name can be filed in the case of anonymous or pseudonymous
9566 works. Paul Goldstein,
<em class=
"citetitle">International Intellectual Property Law,
9567 Cases and Materials
</em> (New York: Foundation Press,
2001),
9568 153–54.
</p></div></div></div></div><div class=
"part" title=
"Del V. Konklusjon"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h1 class=
"title"><a name=
"c-conclusion"></a>Del V. Konklusjon
</h1></div></div></div><div class=
"partintro" title=
"Konklusjon"><div></div><p>
9569 Det er mer enn trettifem millioner mennesker over hele verden med
9570 AIDS-viruset. Tjuefem millioner av dem bor i Afrika sør for Sahara. Sytten
9571 millioner har allerede dødd. Sytten millioner afrikanere er prosentvis
9572 proporsjonalt med syv millioner amerikanere. Viktigere er det at dette er
9573 17 millioner afrikanere.
9575 Det finnes ingen kur for AIDS, men det finnes medisiner som kan hemme
9576 sykdommens utvikling. Disse antiretrovirale terapiene er fortsatt
9577 eksperimentelle, men de har hatt en dramatisk effekt allerede. I USA øker
9578 AIDS-pasienter som regelmessig tar en cocktail av disse medisinene sin
9579 levealder med ti til tjue år. For noen gjøre medisinene sykdommen nesten
9582 Disse medisinene er dyre. Da de ble først introdusert i USA, kostet de
9583 mellom $
10 000 og $
15 000 pr. person hvert år. I dag koster noen av dem $
25
9584 000 pr. år. Med disse prisene har, selvfølgelig, ingen afrikansk stat råd
9585 til medisinen for det store flertall av sine innbyggere: $
15 000 er tredve
9586 ganger brutto nasjonalprodukt pr. innbygger i Zimbabwe. Med slike priser er
9587 disse medisinene fullstendig utilgjengelig.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2601465" href=
"#ftn.id2601465" class=
"footnote">195</a>]
</sup>
9591 Disse prisene er ikke høye fordi ingrediensene til medisinene er dyre.
9592 Disse prisene er høye fordi medisinene er beskyttet av patenter.
9593 Farmasiselskapene som produserer disse livreddende blandingene nyter minst
9594 tjue års monopol på sine oppfinnelser. De bruker denne monopolmakten til å
9595 hente ut så mye de kan fra markedet. Ved hjelp av denne makten holder de
9598 Det er mange som er skeptiske til patenter, spesielt patenter på
9599 medisiner. Det er ikke jeg. Faktisk av alle forskningsområder som kan være
9600 støttet av patenter, er forskning på medisiner, etter min mening, det
9601 klareste tilfelle der patenter er nødvendig. Patenter gir et farmasøytiske
9602 firma en viss forsikring om at hvis det lykkes i å finne opp et nytt
9603 medikament som kan behandle en sykdom, vil det kunne tjene tilbake
9604 investeringen og mer til. Dette ber sosialt et ekstremt verdifullt
9605 insentiv. Jeg er den siste personen som vil argumentere for at loven skal
9606 avskaffe dette, i det minste uten andre endringer.
9608 Men det er én ting å støtte patenter, selv patenter på medisiner. Det er en
9609 annen ting å avgjøre hvordan en best skal håndtere en krise. Og i det
9610 afrikanske ledere begynte å erkjenne ødeleggelsen AIDS brakte, begynte de å
9611 se etter måter å importere HIV-medisiner til kostnader betydelig under
9614 I
1997 forsøkte Sør-Afrika seg på en tilnærming. Landet vedtok en lov som
9615 tillot import av patenterte medisiner som hadde blitt produsert og solgt i
9616 en annen nasjons marked med godkjenning fra patenteieren. For eksempel,
9617 hvis medisinen var solgt i India, så kunne den bli importert inn til Afrika
9618 fra India. Dette kalles "parallellimport" og er generelt tillatt i
9619 internasjonal handelslovgivning, og spesifikt tillatt i den europeiske
9620 union.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2601542" href=
"#ftn.id2601542" class=
"footnote">196</a>]
</sup>
9622 Men USA var imot lovendringen. Og de nøyde seg ikke med å være imot. Som
9623 International Intellectual Property Association karakteriserte det,
9624 "Myndighetene i USA presset Sør-Afrika . . . til å ikke tillate tvungen
9625 lisensiering eller parallellimport"
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2601579" href=
"#ftn.id2601579" class=
"footnote">197</a>]
</sup>
9626 Gjennom kontoret til USAs handelsrepresentant (USTR), ba myndighetene
9627 Sør-Afrika om å endre loven
—og for å legge press bak den
9628 forespørselen, listet USTR i
1998 opp Sør-Afrika som et land som burde
9629 vurderes for handelsrestriksjoner. Samme år gikk mer enn førti
9630 farmasiselskaper til retten for å utfordre myndighetenes handlinger. USA
9631 fikk selskap av andre myndigheter fra EU. Deres påstand, og påstanden til
9632 farmasiselskapene, var at Sør-Afrika brøt sine internasjonale forpliktelser
9633 ved å distriminere mot en bestemt type patenter
—farmasøytiske
9634 patenter. Kravet fra disse myndighetene, med USA i spissen, var at
9635 Sør-Afrika skulle respektere disse patentene på samme måte som alle andre
9636 patenter, uavhengig av eventuell effekt på behandlingen av AIDS i
9637 Sør-Afrika.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2601608" href=
"#ftn.id2601608" class=
"footnote">198</a>]
</sup>
9639 Vi bør sette intervensjonen til USA i sammenheng. Det er ingen tvil om at
9640 patenter ikke er den viktigste årsaken til at Afrikanere ikke har tilgang
9641 til medisiner. Fattigdom og den totale mangel på effektivt helsevesen betyr
9642 mer. Men uansett om patenter er en viktigste grunnen eller ikke, så har
9643 prisen på medisiner en effekt på etterspørselen, og patenter påvirker
9644 prisen. Så uansett, massiv eller marginal, så var det en effekt av våre
9645 myndigheters intervensjon for å stoppe flyten av medisiner inn til Afrika.
9647 Ved å stoppe flyten av HIV-behandling til Afrika, sikret ikke myndighetene i
9648 USA medisiner til USA borgere. Dette er ikke som hvete (hvis de spise det så
9649 kan ikke vi spise det). Det som USA i effekt intervenerte for å stoppe, var
9650 flyten av kunnskap: Informasjon om hvordan en kan ta kjemikalier som finnes
9651 i Afrika og gjøre disse kjemikaliene om til medisiner som kan redde
15 til
9654 Intervensjonen fra USA ville heller ikke beskytte fortjenesten til
9655 medisinselskapene i USA
— i hvert fall ikke betydelig. Det var jo ikke
9656 slik at disse landene hadde mulighet til å kjøpe medisinene til de prisene
9657 som medisinselskapene forlangte. Igjen var afrikanerne for fattige til å ha
9658 råd til disse medisinene til de tilbudte prisene. Å blokkere for
9659 parallellimport av disse medisinene ville ikke øke salget til de amerikanske
9660 selskapene betydelig.
9662 I stedet var argumentet til fordel for restriksjoner på denne flyten av
9663 informasjon, som var nødvendig for å redde millioner av liv, et argument om
9664 eiendoms ukrenkelighet.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2601702" href=
"#ftn.id2601702" class=
"footnote">199</a>]
</sup> Det var på
9665 grunn av at "intellektuell eiendom" ville bli krenket at disse medisinene
9666 ikke skulle flomme inn til Afrika. Det var prinsippet om viktigheten av
9667 "intellektuell eiendom" som fikk disse myndighetsaktørene til å intervenere
9668 mot Sør-Afrikas mottiltak mot AIDS.
9670 La oss ta et skritt tilbake for et øyeblikk. En gang om tredve år vil våre
9671 barn se tilbake på oss og spørre, hvordan kunne vi la dette skje? Hvordan
9672 kunne vi tillate å gjennomføre en politikk hvis direkte kostnad var få
15
9673 til
30 millioner afrikanere til å dø raskere, og hvis eneste virkelige
9674 fordel var å opprettholde "ukrenkeligheten" til en idé? Hva slags
9675 berettigelse kan noen sinne eksistere for en politikk som resulterer i så
9676 mange døde? Hva slags galskap er det egentlig som tillater at så mange dør
9677 for slik en abstraksjon?
9679 Noen skylder på farmasiselskapene. Det gjør ikke jeg. De er selskaper, og
9680 deres ledere er lovpålagt å tjene penger for selskapene. De presser på for
9681 en bestemt patentpolitikk, ikke på grunn av idealer, men fordi det er dette
9682 som gjør at de tjener mest penger. Og dette gjør kun at de tjener mest
9683 penger på grunn av en slags korrupsjon i vårt politiske system
— en
9684 korrupsjon som farmasiselskapene helt klart ikke er ansvarlige for.
9686 Denne korrupsjonen er våre egne politikeres manglende integritet. For
9687 medisinprodusentene ville elske
—sier de selv, og jeg tror dem
—
9688 å selge sine medisiner så billig som de kan til land i Afrika og andre
9689 steder. Det er utfordringer de må løse å sikre at medisinene ikke kommer
9690 tilbake til USA, men dette er bare teknologiske utfordring. De kan bli
9694 Et annet problem kan derimot ikke løses. Det er frykten for at en politiker
9695 som skal vise seg og kaller inn lederne hos medisinprodusentene til høring i
9696 senatet eller representantenes hus og spør, "hvordan har det seg at du kan
9697 selge HIV-medisinen i Afrika for bare $
1 pr. pille, mens samme pille koster
9698 en amerikansker $
1500?" Da det ikke finnes et "kjapt svar" på det
9699 spørsmålet, ville effekten bli regulering av priser i Amerika.
9700 Medisinprodusentene unngård dermed denne spiralen ved å sikre at det første
9701 steget ikke tas. De forsterker idéen om at eierrettigheter skal være
9702 ukrenkelige. De legger seg på en rasjonell strategi i en irrasjonell
9703 omgivelse, med den utilsiktede konsekvens at kanskje millioner dør. Og den
9704 rasjonelle strategien rammes dermed inn ved hjel av dette
9705 ideal
—helligheten til en idé som kalles "immaterielle rettigheter".
9707 Så når du konfronteres av ditt barns sunne fornuft, hva vil du si? Når den
9708 sunne fornuften hos en generasjon endelig gjør opprør mot hva vi har gjort,
9709 hvordan vil vi rettferdiggjøre det? Hva er argumentet?
9711 En fornuftig patentpolitikk kunne gå god for og gi sterk støtte til
9712 patentsystemet uten å måtte nå alle overalt på nøyaktig samme måte. På samme
9713 måte som en fornuftig opphavsrettspolitikk kunne gå god for og gi sterk
9714 støtte til et opphavsretts-system uten å måtte regulere spredningen av
9715 kultur perfekt og for alltid. En fornuftig patentpolitikk kunne gå god for
9716 og gi sterk støtte til et patentsystem uten å måtte blokkere spredning av
9717 medisiner til et land som uansett ikke er rikt nok til å ha råd til
9718 markedsprisen. En fornuftig politikk kan en dermed si kunne være en
9719 balansert politikk. For det meste av vår historie har både opphavsrett- og
9720 patentpolitikken i denne forstand vært balansert.
9723 Men vi som kultur har mistet denne følelsen for balanse. Vi har mistet det
9724 kritiske blikket som hjelper oss til å se forkjellen mellom sannhet og
9725 ekstremisme. En slags eiendomsfundamentalisme, uten grunnlag i vår
9726 tradisjon, hersker nå i vår kultur
—sært, og med konsekvenser mer
9727 alvorlig for spredningen av idéer og kultur enn nesten enhver annen politisk
9728 enkeltavgjørelse vi som demokrati kan fatte. En enkel idé blender oss, og
9729 under dekke av mørket skjer mye som de fleste av oss ville avvist hvis vi
9730 hadde fulgt med. Så ukritisk aksepterer vi idéen om eierskap til idéer at
9731 vi ikke engang legger merke til hvor uhyrlig det er å nekte tilgang til
9732 idéer for et folk som dør uten dem. Så ukritisk aksepterer vi idéen om
9733 eiendom til kulturen at vi ikke engang stiller spørsmål ved når kontrollen
9734 over denne eiendommen fjerner vår evne, som folk, til å utvikle vår kultur
9735 demokratisk. Blindhet blir vår sunne fornuft, og utfordringen for enhver
9736 som vil gjenvinne retten til å dyrke vår kultur er å finne en måte å få
9737 denne sunne fornuften til å åpne sine øyne.
9739 Så langt sover sunn fornuft. Det er intet opprør. Sunn fornuft ser ennå
9740 ikke hva det er å gjøre opprør mot. Ekstremismen som nå domunerer denne
9741 debatten resonerer med idéer som virker naturlige, og resonansen er
9742 forsterket av våre moderne RCA-ene. De fører en frenetisk krig for å
9743 bekjempe "piratvirksomhet" og knuser kreativitetskultur. De forsvarer idéen
9744 om "kreativt eierskap", mens de endrer ekte skapere til moderne
9745 leilendinger. De blir fornermet av idéen om at rettigheter skulle være
9746 balanserte, selv om hver av hovedaktørene i denne innholdskrigen selv hadde
9747 fordeler av et mer balansert ideal. Hykleriet rår. Men i en by som
9748 Washington blir ikke hykleriet en gang lakt merke til. Mektige lobbyister,
9749 kompliserte problemer og MTV-oppmerksomhetsspenn gir en "perfekt storm" for
9752 I august
2003 brøt en kamp ut i USA om en avgjørelse fra World Intellectual
9753 Property Organiation om å avlyse et møte.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2601827" href=
"#ftn.id2601827" class=
"footnote">200</a>]
</sup> På forespørsel fra en lang rekke med interresenter hadde WIPO
9754 bestemt å avholde et møte for å diskutere "åpne og sammarbeidende prosjekter
9755 for å skape goder for felleskapet". Disse prosjektene som hadde lyktes i å
9756 produsere goder for fellesskapet uten å basere seg eksklusivt på bruken av
9757 proprietære immaterielle rettigheter. Eksempler inkluderer internettet og
9758 verdensveven, begge som ble utviklet på grunnlag av protokoller i
9759 allemannseie. Det hadde med en begynnende trend for å støtte åpne
9760 akademiske tidsskrifter, og inkluderte Public Library of Science-prosjektet
9761 som jeg beskriver i etterordet. Det inkluderte et prosjekt for a utvikle
9762 enkeltnukleotidforskjeller (SNPs), som er antatt å få stor betydning i
9763 biomedisinsk forskning. (Dette ideelle prosjektet besto av et konsortium av
9764 Wellcome Trust og farmasøytiske og teknologiske selskaper, inkludert
9765 Amersham Biosciences, AstraZeneca, Aventis, Bayer, Bristol-Myers Squibb,
9766 Hoffmann-La Roche, Glaxo-SmithKline, IBM, Motorola, Novartis, Pfizer, og
9767 Searle.) Det inkluderte Globalt posisjonssystem (GPS) som Ronald Reagen
9768 frigjorde tidlig på
1980-tallet. Og det inkluderte "åpen kildekode og fri
9769 programvare".
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2602004"></a>
9771 Formålet med møtet var å vurdere denne rekken av prosjekter fra et felles
9772 perspektiv: at ingen av disse prosjektene hadde som grunnlag immateriell
9773 ekstremisme. I stedet, hos alle disse, ble immaterielle rettigheter
9774 balansert med avtaler om å holde tilgang åpen, eller for å legge
9775 begrensninger på hvordan proprietære krav kan bli brukt.
9777 Dermed var, fra perspektivet i denne boken, denne konferansen
9778 ideell.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2602031" href=
"#ftn.id2602031" class=
"footnote">201</a>]
</sup> Prosjektene innenfor temaet var
9779 både kommersielle og ikkekommersielle verker. De involverte i hovedsak
9780 vitenskapet, men fra mange perspektiver. Og WIPO var et ideelt sted for
9781 denne diskusjonen, siden WIPO var den fremstående internasjonale aktør som
9782 drev med immaterielle rettighetsspørsmål.
9785 Faktisk fikk jeg en gang offentlig kjeft for å ikke anerkjenne dette faktum
9786 om WIPO. I februar
2003 leverte jeg et hovedinnlegg på en forberedende
9787 konferanse for World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). På en
9788 pressekonferanse før innlegget, ble jeg spurt hva jeg skulle snakke om. Jeg
9789 svarte at jeg skulle snakke litt om viktigheten av balanse rundt
9790 immaterielle verdier for utviklingen av informasjonssamfunnet. Ordstyreren
9791 på arrangementet avbrøt meg da brått for å informere meg og journalistene
9792 tilstede at ingen spørsmål rundt immaterielle verdier ville bli diskutert av
9793 WSIS, da slike spørsmål kun skulle diskuteres i WIPO. I innlegget jeg hadde
9794 forberedt var temaet om immaterielle verdier en forholdvis liten del av det
9795 hele. Men etter denne forbløffende uttalelsen, gjorde jeg immaterielle
9796 verdier til hovedfokus for mitt innlegg. Det var ikke mulig å snakke om et
9797 "informasjonssamfunn" uten at en også snakket om andelen av informasjon og
9798 kultur som ikke er vernet av opphavsretten. Mitt innlegg gjorde ikke min
9799 overivrige moderator veldig glad. Og hun hadde uten tvil rett i at omfanget
9800 til vern av immaterielle rettigheter normalt hørte inn under WIPO. Men
9801 etter mitt syn, kunne det ikke bli for mye diskusjon om hvor mye
9802 immaterielle rettigheter som trengs, siden etter mitt syn, hadde selve ideen
9803 om en balanse rundt immaterielle rettigheter hadde gått tapt.
9805 Så uansett om WSIS kan diskutere balanse i intellektuell eiendom eller ikke,
9806 så hadde jeg trodd det var tatt for gitt at WIPO kunne og burde. Og dermed
9807 møtet om "åpne og samarbeidende prosjekter for å skape fellesgoder" virker å
9808 passe perfekt for WIPOs agenda.
9810 Men det er ett prosjekt i listen som er svært kontroversielt, i hvert fall
9811 blant lobbyister. Dette prosjektet er "åpen kildekode og fri
9812 programvare". Microsoft spesielt er skeptisk til diskusjon om emnet. Fra
9813 deres perspektiv, ville en konferanse for å diskutere åpen kildekode og fri
9814 programvare være som en konferanse for å diskutere Apples operativsystem.
9815 Både åpen kildekode og fri programvare konkurrerer med Microsofts
9816 programvare. Og internasjonalt har mange myndigheter begynt å utforske krav
9817 om at de skal bruke åpen kildekode eller fri programvare, i stedet for
9818 "proprietær programvare," til sine egne interne behov.
9820 I don't mean to enter that debate here. It is important only to make clear
9821 that the distinction is not between commercial and noncommercial
9822 software. There are many important companies that depend fundamentally upon
9823 open source and free software, IBM being the most prominent. IBM is
9824 increasingly shifting its focus to the GNU/Linux operating system, the most
9825 famous bit of "free software"
—and IBM is emphatically a commercial
9826 entity. Thus, to support "open source and free software" is not to oppose
9827 commercial entities. It is, instead, to support a mode of software
9828 development that is different from Microsoft's.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2601886" href=
"#ftn.id2601886" class=
"footnote">202</a>]
</sup> <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2602169"></a>
9831 Mer viktig for våre formål, er at å støtte "åpen kildekode og fri
9832 programvare" ikke er å motsette seg opphasvrett. "Åpen kildekode og fri
9833 programvare" er ikke programvare uten opphavsrettslig vern. Istedet, på
9834 samme måte som programvare fra Microsoft, insisterer opphavsrettsinnehaverne
9835 av fri programvare ganske sterkt at vilkårene i deres programvarelisens blir
9836 respektert av de som tar i bruk fri programvare. Vilkårene i den lisensen
9837 er uten tvil forskjellig fra vilkårene i en proprietær programvarelisens.
9838 For eksempel krever fri programvare lisensiert med den generelle offentlige
9839 lisensen (GPL), at kildekoden for programvare gjøres tilgjengelig for alle
9840 som endrer og redistribuerer programvaren. Men dette kravet er kun
9841 effektivt hvis opphavsrett råder over programvare. Hvis opphavsretten ikke
9842 råder over programvare, så kunne ikke fri programvare pålegge slike krav på
9843 de som tar i bruk programvaren. Den er dermed like avhengig av
9844 opphavsrettsloven som Microsoft.
9846 Det er dermed forståelig at Microsoft, som utviklere av proprietær
9847 programvare, gikk imot et slikt WIPO-møte, og like fullt forståelig at de
9848 bruker sine lobbyister til å få USAs myndigheter til å gå imot møtet. Og
9849 ganske riktig, det er akkurat dette som i følge rapporter hadde skjedd. I
9850 følge Jonathan Krim i
<em class=
"citetitle">Washington Post
</em>, lyktes
9851 Microsofts lobbyister i å få USAs myndigheter til å legge ned veto mot et
9852 slikt møte.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2602232" href=
"#ftn.id2602232" class=
"footnote">203</a>]
</sup> Og uten støtte fra USA ble
9855 Jeg klandrer ikke Microsoft for å gjøre det de kan for å fremme sine egne
9856 interesser i samsvar med loven. Og lobbyvirksomhet mot myndighetene er
9857 åpenbart i samsvar med loven. Det er ikke noe overraskende her med deres
9858 lobbyvirksomhet, og ikke veldig overraskende at den mektigste
9859 programvareprodusenten i USA har lyktes med sin lobbyvirksomhet.
9861 Det som var overraskende var USAs regjerings begrunnelse for å være imot
9862 møtet. Igjen, siterert av krim, forklarte Lois Boland, direktør for
9863 internasjonale forbindelser ved USAs patent og varemerkekontor, at
9864 "programvare med åpen kildekode går imot til formålet til WIPO, som er å
9865 fremme immatterielle rettigheter.". Hun skal i følge sitatet ha sagt, "Å
9866 holde et møte som har som formål å fraskrive seg eller frafalle slike
9867 rettigheter synes for oss å være i strid med formålene til WIPO."
9869 Disse utsagnene er forbløffende på flere nivåer.
9871 For det første er de ganske enkelt enkelt ikke riktige. Som jeg beskrev, er
9872 det meste av åpen kildekode og fri programvare fundamentalt avhengig av den
9873 immaterielle retten kalt "opphavsrett". Uten den vil begresningene definert
9874 av disse lisensene ikke fungere. Dermed er det å si at de "går imot"
9875 formålet om å fremme immaterielle rettigheter å avsløre en ekstraordinær
9876 mangel på forståelse
—den type feil som er tilgivelig hos en førsteårs
9877 jusstudent, men pinlig fra en høyt plassert statstjenestemann som håndterer
9878 utfordringer rundt immaterielle rettigheter.
9880 For det andre, hvem har noen gang hevdet at WIPOs eksklusive mål var å
9881 "fremme" immaterielle rettigheter maksimalt? Som jeg fikk kjeft om på den
9882 forberedende konferansen til WSIS, skal WIPO vurdere ikke bare hvordan best
9883 beskytte immaterielle rettigheter, men også hva som er den beste balansen
9884 rundt immaterielle rettigheter. Som enhver økonom og advokat vet, er det
9885 vanskelige spørsmålet i immaterielle rettighetsjuss å finne den balansen.
9886 Men at det skulle være en grense, trodde jeg, var ubestridt. Man ønsker å
9887 spørre Ms. boland om generelle medisiner (medisiner basert på medisiner med
9888 patenter som er utløpt) i strid med WIPOs oppdrag? Svekker allemannseie
9889 immaterielle rettigheter? Ville det vært bedre om internettets protokoller
9890 hadde vært patentert?
9892 For det tredje, selv om en tror at formålet med WIPO var å maksimere
9893 immaterielle rettigheter, så innehas immaterielle rettigheter, i vår
9894 tradisjon, av individer og selskaper. De får bestemme hva som skal gjøres
9895 med disse rettighetene, igjen fordi det er
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>de
</em></span> som eier
9896 rettigetene. Hvis de ønsker å "frafalle" eller "frasi" seg sine rettigheter,
9897 så er det helt etter boka i vår tradisjon. Når Bill Gates gir bort mer enn
9898 $
20 milliarder til gode formål, så er ikke det uforenelig med målene til
9899 eiendomssystemet. Det er heller tvert i mot, akkurat hva eiendomssysstemet
9900 er ment å oppnå, at individer har retten til å bestemme hva de vil gjøre med
9901 <span class=
"emphasis"><em>sin
</em></span> eiendom.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2602370"></a>
9904 Når Ms. Boland sier at det er noe galt med et møte "som har som sitt formål
9905 å fraskrive eller frafalle slike rettigheter", så sier hun at WIPO har en
9906 interesse i å påvirke valgene til enkeltpersoner som eier immaterielle
9907 rettigheter. At på en eller annen WIPOs oppdrag bør være å stoppe individer
9908 fra å "frakrive" eller "frafalle" seg sine immaterielle rettigheter. At
9909 interessen til WIPO ikke bare er maksimale immaterielle rettigheter, men
9910 også at de skal utøves på den mest ekstreme og restriktive mulig måten.
9912 Det er en historie om akkurat et slikt eierskapssystem som er velkjent i den
9913 anglo-amerikansk tradisjon. Det kalles "føydalisme". Under føydalismen var
9914 eiendommer ikke bare kontrollert av et relativt lite antall individer og
9915 aktører. Men det føydale systemet hadde en sterk interesse i å sikre at
9916 landeier i systemet ikke svekke føydalismen ved å frigjøre folkene og
9917 eiendomene som de kontrollerte til det frie markedet. Føydalismen var
9918 avhengig av maksimal kontroll og konsentrasjon. Det sloss mot enhver frihet
9919 som kunne forstyrre denne kontrollen.
9920 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2602411"></a><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2602417"></a><p>
9921 Som Peter Drahos og John Braithwaite beskriver, dette er nøyaktig det valget
9922 vi nå gjør om immaterielle rettigheter.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2602430" href=
"#ftn.id2602430" class=
"footnote">204</a>]
</sup>
9923 Vi kommer til å få et informasjonssamfunn. Så mye er sikkert. Vårt eneste
9924 valg nå er hvorvidt dette informasjonssamfunnet skal være
9925 <span class=
"emphasis"><em>fritt
</em></span> eller
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>føydalt
</em></span>. Trenden er
9928 Da denne bataljen brøt ut, blogget jeg om dette. En heftig debatt brøt ut i
9929 kommentarfeltet. Ms. Boland hadde en rekke støttespillere som forsøkte å
9930 vise hvorfor hennes kommentarer ga mening. Men det var spesielt en
9931 kommentar som gjorde meg trist. En anonym kommentator skrev,
9932 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
9934 George, du misforstår Lessig: Han snakker bare om verden slik den burde være
9935 ("målet til WIPO, og målet til enhver regjering, bør være å fremme den
9936 riktige balansen for immaterielle rettigheter, ikke bare å fremme
9937 immaterielle rettigheter"), ikke som den er. Hvis vi snakket om verden slik
9938 den er, så har naturligvis Boland ikke sagt noe galt. Men i verden slik
9939 Lessig vil at den skal være, er det åpenbart at hun har sagt noe galt. En
9940 må alltid være oppmerksom på forskjellen mellom Lessigs og vår verden.
9941 </p></blockquote></div><p>
9942 Jeg gikk glipp av ironien først gangen jeg leste den. Jeg lese den raskt og
9943 trodde forfatteren støttet idéen om at det våre myndigheter burde gjøre var
9944 å søke balanse. (Min kritikk av Ms Boland, selvfølgelig, var ikke om
9945 hvorvidt hun søkte balanse eller ikke; min kritikk var at hennes kommentarer
9946 avslørte en feil kun en førsteårs jussstudent burde kunne gjøre. Jeg har
9947 noen illusjon om ekstremismen hos våre myndigheter, uansett om de er
9948 republikanere eller demokrater. Min eneste tilsynelatende illusjon er
9949 hvorvidt våre myndigheter bør snakke sant eller ikke.)
9951 Det var dermot åpenbart at den som postet meldingen ikke støttet idéen. I
9952 stedet latterliggjorde forfatteren selve idéen om at i den virkelig verden
9953 skulle "målet" til myndighetene være "å fremme den riktige balanse" for
9954 immaterielle rettigheter. Det var åpenbart tåpelig for ham. Og det
9955 avslørte åpenbart, trodde han, min egen tåpelige utopisme. "Typisk for en
9956 akademiker", kunne forfatteren like gjerne ha fortsatt.
9958 Jeg forstår kritikken av akademisk utopisme. Jeg mener også at utopisme er
9959 tåpelig, og jeg vil være blant de første til å gjøre narr av de aburde
9960 urealisistiske idealer til akademikere gjennom historien (og ikke bare i
9961 vårt eget lands historie).
9963 Men når det har blitt dumt å anta at rollen til våre myndigheter bør være å
9964 "oppnå balanse", da kan du regne meg blant de dumme, for det betyr at dette
9965 faktisk har blitt ganske seriøst. Hvis det bør være åpenbart for alle at
9966 myndighetene ikke søker å oppnå balanse, at myndighetene ganske enkelt et
9967 verktøy for de mektigste lobbyistene, at ideen om å forvente bedre av
9968 myndighetene er absurd, at ideen om å kreve at myndighetene snakker sant og
9969 ikke lyver bare er naiv, hva har da vi, det mektigste demokratiet i verden,
9973 Det kan være galskap å forvente at en mektig myndigshetsperson skal si
9974 sannheten. Det kan være galskap å tro at myndighetenes politikk skal gjøre
9975 mer enn å tjene de mektigste interesser. Det kan være galskap å argumentere
9976 for å bevare en tradisjon som har vært en del av vår tradisjon for
9977 mesteparten av vår historie
—fri kultur.
9978 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2602555"></a><p>
9979 Hvis dette er galskap, så la det være mer gærninger. Snart. Det finnes
9980 øyeblikk av håp i denne kampen. Og øyeblikk som overrasker. Da FCC vurderte
9981 mindre strenge eierskapregler, som ville ytterligere konsentrere
9982 mediaeierskap, dannet det seg en en ekstraordinær koalisjon på tvers av
9983 partiene for å bekjempe endringen. For kanskje første gang i historien
9984 organiserte interesser så forskjellige som NRA, ACLU, moveon.org, William
9985 Safire, Ted Turner og Codepink Women for Piece seg for å protestere på denne
9986 endringen i FCC-reglene. Så mange som
700 000 brev ble sendt til FCC med
9987 krav om flere høringer og et annet resultat.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2602576"></a> <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2602582"></a>
9989 Disse protestene stoppet ikke FCC, men like etter stemte en bred koalisjon i
9990 senatet for å reversere avgjørelsen i FCC. De fientlige høringene som ledet
9991 til avstemmingen avslørte hvor mektig denne bevegelsen hadde blitt. Det var
9992 ingen betydnigsfull støtte for FCCs avgjørelse, mens det var bred og
9993 vedvarende støtte for å bekjempe ytterligere konsentrasjon i media.
9995 Men selv denne bevegelsen går glipp av en viktig brikke i puslespillet. Å
9996 være stor er ikke ille i seg selv. Frihet er ikke truet bare på grunn av at
9997 noen blir veldig rik, eller på grunn av at det bare er en håndfull store
9998 aktører. Den dårlige kvaliteten til Big Macs eller Quartar Punders betyr
9999 ikke at du ikke kan få en god hamburger andre steder.
10001 Faren med mediakonsentrasjon kommer ikke fra selve konsentrasjonen, men
10002 kommer fra føydalismen som denne konsentrasjonen fører til når den kobles
10003 til endringer i opphavsretten. Det er ikke kun at det er noen mektige
10004 selskaper som styrer en stadig voksende andel av mediene. Det er at denne
10005 konsentrasjonen kan påkalle en like oppsvulmet rekke
10006 rettigheter
—eiendomsrettigheter i en historisk ekstrem form
—som
10007 gjør størrelsen ille.
10009 Det er derfor betydningsfullt at så mange vil kjempe for å kreve konkurranse
10010 og økt mangfold. Likevel, hvis kampanjen blir forstått til å kun gjelde
10011 størrelse, så er ikke det veldig overraskende. Vi amerikanere har en lang
10012 historie med å slåss mot "stort", klokt eller ikke. At vi kan være motivert
10013 til å slåss mot "store" igjen ikke noe nytt.
10015 Det ville vært noe nytt, og noe veldig viktig, hvis like mange kan være med
10016 på en kampanje for å bekjempe økende ekstremisme bygget inn i idéen om
10017 "intellektuell eiendom". Ikke fordi balanse er fremmed for vår
10018 tradisjon. Jeg agumenterer for at balanse er vår tradisjon. Men fordi evnen
10019 til å tenke kritisk på omfanget av alt som kalles "eiendom" ikke er lenger
10020 er godt trent i denne tradisjonen.
10022 Hvis vi var Akilles, så ville dette være vår hæl. Dette ville være stedet
10024 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2602675"></a><p>
10025 Mens jeg skriver disse avsluttende ordene, er nyhetene fylt med historier om
10026 at RIAA saksøker nesten tre hundre individer.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2602687" href=
"#ftn.id2602687" class=
"footnote">205</a>]
</sup> Eminem har nettopp blitt saksøkt for å ha "samplet" noen andres
10027 musikk.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2602733" href=
"#ftn.id2602733" class=
"footnote">206</a>]
</sup> Historien om hvordan Bob Dylan
10028 har "stjålet" fra en japansk forfatter har nettopp gått verden
10029 over.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2602751" href=
"#ftn.id2602751" class=
"footnote">207</a>]
</sup> En på innsiden i
10030 Hollywood
—som insisterer på at han må forbli anonym
—rapporterer
10031 "en utrolig samtale med disse studiofolkene. De har fantastisk [gammelt]
10032 innhold som de ville elske å bruke, men det kan de ikke på grunn av at de
10033 først må klarere rettighetene. De har hauger med ungdommer som kunne gjøre
10034 fantastiske ting med innholdet, men det vil først kreve hauger med advokater
10035 for å klarere det først". Kongressrepresentanter snakker om å gi datavirus
10036 politimyndighet for å ta ned datamaskiner som antas å bryte loven.
10037 Universiteter truer med å utvise ungdommer som bruker en datamaskin for å
10039 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2602767"></a><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2602791"></a><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2602798"></a><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2602804"></a><p>
10041 I mens på andre siden av atlanteren har BBC nettopp annonsert at de vil
10042 bygge opp et "kreativt arkiv" som britiske borgere kan laste ned BBC-innhold
10043 fra, og rippe, mikse og brenne det ut.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2602821" href=
"#ftn.id2602821" class=
"footnote">208</a>]
</sup>
10044 Og i Brasil har kulturministeren, Gilberto Gil, i seg selv en folkehelt i
10045 brasiliansk musikk, slått seg sammen med Creative Commons for å gi ut
10046 innhold og frie lisenser i dette latinamerikanske landet.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2602842" href=
"#ftn.id2602842" class=
"footnote">209</a>]
</sup> Jeg har fortalt en mørk historie. Sannheten mer
10047 mer blandet. En teknologi har gitt oss mer frihet. Sakte begynner noen å
10048 forstå at denne friheten trenger ikke å bety anarki. Vi kan få med oss fri
10049 kultur inn i det tjueførste århundre, uten at artister taper og uten at
10050 potensialet for digital teknologi blir knust. Det vil kreve omtanke, og
10051 viktigere, det vil kreve at noen omforme RCAene av i dag til Causbyere.
10054 Sunn fornuft må gjøre opprør. Den må handle for å frigjøre kulturen. Og
10055 snart, hvis dette potensialet skal noen gang bli realisert.
10059 </p><div class=
"toc"><p><b>Innholdsfortegnelse
</b></p><dl><dt><span class=
"chapter"><a href=
"#id2602879">16.
</a></span></dt></dl></div><div class=
"footnotes"><br><hr width=
"100" align=
"left"><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2601465" href=
"#id2601465" class=
"para">195</a>]
</sup>
10061 Commission on Intellectual Property Rights, "Final Report: Integrating
10062 Intellectual Property Rights and Development Policy" (London,
2002),
10063 tilgjengelig fra
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link
10064 #
55</a>. I følge en pressemelding fra verdens helseorganisasjon sendt ut
10065 9. juli
2002, mottar kun
320 000 av de
6 millioner som trenger medisiner i
10066 utviklingsland dem de trenger
—og halvparten av dem er i Brasil.
10067 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2601542" href=
"#id2601542" class=
"para">196</a>]
</sup>
10069 See Peter Drahos with John Braithwaite, Information Feudalism:
10070 <em class=
"citetitle">Who Owns the Knowledge Economy?
</em> (New York: The New
10071 Press,
2003),
37.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2601551"></a> <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2601560"></a>
10072 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2601579" href=
"#id2601579" class=
"para">197</a>]
</sup>
10075 International Intellectual Property Institute (IIPI),
<em class=
"citetitle">Patent
10076 Protection and Access to HIV/AIDS Pharmaceuticals in Sub-Saharan Africa, a
10077 Report Prepared for the World Intellectual Property Organization
</em>
10078 (Washington, D.C.,
2000),
14, available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
56</a>. For a firsthand
10079 account of the struggle over South Africa, see Hearing Before the
10080 Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources, House
10081 Committee on Government Reform, H. Rep.,
1st sess., Ser. No.
106-
126 (
22
10082 July
1999),
150–57 (statement of James Love).
10083 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2601608" href=
"#id2601608" class=
"para">198</a>]
</sup>
10086 International Intellectual Property Institute (IIPI),
<em class=
"citetitle">Patent
10087 Protection and Access to HIV/AIDS Pharmaceuticals in Sub-Saharan Africa, en
10088 rapport forberedt for the World Intellectual Property
10089 Organization
</em> (Washington, D.C.,
2000),
15.
</p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2601702" href=
"#id2601702" class=
"para">199</a>]
</sup>
10093 See Sabin Russell, "New Crusade to Lower AIDS Drug Costs: Africa's Needs at
10094 Odds with Firms' Profit Motive,"
<em class=
"citetitle">San Francisco
10095 Chronicle
</em>,
24 May
1999, A1, available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
57</a> ("compulsory licenses
10096 and gray markets pose a threat to the entire system of intellectual property
10097 protection"); Robert Weissman, "AIDS and Developing Countries: Democratizing
10098 Access to Essential Medicines,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Foreign Policy in
10099 Focus
</em> 4:
23 (August
1999), available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
58</a> (describing
10100 U.S. policy); John A. Harrelson, "TRIPS, Pharmaceutical Patents, and the
10101 HIV/AIDS Crisis: Finding the Proper Balance Between Intellectual Property
10102 Rights and Compassion, a Synopsis,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Widener Law Symposium
10103 Journal
</em> (Spring
2001):
175.
10105 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2601827" href=
"#id2601827" class=
"para">200</a>]
</sup>
10107 Jonathan Krim, "The Quiet War over Open-Source,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Washington
10108 Post
</em>, August
2003, E1, available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
59</a>; William New, "Global
10109 Group's Shift on `Open Source' Meeting Spurs Stir,"
<em class=
"citetitle">National
10110 Journal's Technology Daily
</em>,
19 August
2003, available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
60</a>; William New,
10111 "U.S. Official Opposes `Open Source' Talks at WIPO,"
<em class=
"citetitle">National
10112 Journal's Technology Daily
</em>,
19 August
2003, available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
61</a>.
10113 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2602031" href=
"#id2602031" class=
"para">201</a>]
</sup>
10115 Jeg bør nevne at jeg var en av folkene som ba WIPO om dette møtet.
10116 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2601886" href=
"#id2601886" class=
"para">202</a>]
</sup>
10119 Microsoft's position about free and open source software is more
10120 sophisticated. As it has repeatedly asserted, it has no problem with "open
10121 source" software or software in the public domain. Microsoft's principal
10122 opposition is to "free software" licensed under a "copyleft" license,
10123 meaning a license that requires the licensee to adopt the same terms on any
10124 derivative work. See Bradford L. Smith, "The Future of Software: Enabling
10125 the Marketplace to Decide,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Government Policy Toward Open Source
10126 Software
</em> (Washington, D.C.: AEI-Brookings Joint Center for
10127 Regulatory Studies, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy
10128 Research,
2002),
69, available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
62</a>. See also Craig Mundie,
10129 Microsoft senior vice president,
<em class=
"citetitle">The Commercial Software
10130 Model
</em>, discussion at New York University Stern School of
10131 Business (
3 May
2001), available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
63</a>.
10132 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2602232" href=
"#id2602232" class=
"para">203</a>]
</sup>
10135 Krim, "The Quiet War over Open-Source," tilgjengelig fra
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
64</a>.
10136 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2602430" href=
"#id2602430" class=
"para">204</a>]
</sup>
10138 See Drahos with Braithwaite,
<em class=
"citetitle">Information Feudalism
</em>,
10139 210–20.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2601602"></a>
10140 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2602687" href=
"#id2602687" class=
"para">205</a>]
</sup>
10143 John Borland, "RIAA Sues
261 File Swappers," CNET News.com, September
2003,
10144 available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
65</a>;
10145 Paul R. La Monica, "Music Industry Sues Swappers," CNN/Money,
8 September
10146 2003, available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link
10147 #
66</a>; Soni Sangha and Phyllis Furman with Robert Gearty, "Sued for a
10148 Song, N.Y.C.
12-Yr-Old Among
261 Cited as Sharers,"
<em class=
"citetitle">New York
10149 Daily News
</em>,
9 September
2003,
3; Frank Ahrens, "RIAA's Lawsuits
10150 Meet Surprised Targets; Single Mother in Calif.,
12-Year-Old Girl in
10151 N.Y. Among Defendants,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Washington Post
</em>,
10 September
10152 2003, E1; Katie Dean, "Schoolgirl Settles with RIAA,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Wired
10153 News
</em>,
10 September
2003, available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
67</a>.
10154 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2602733" href=
"#id2602733" class=
"para">206</a>]
</sup>
10157 Jon Wiederhorn, "Eminem Gets Sued . . . by a Little Old Lady," mtv.com,
10158 17. september
2003, tilgjengelig fra
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
68</a>.
10159 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2602751" href=
"#id2602751" class=
"para">207</a>]
</sup>
10163 Kenji Hall, Associated Press, "Japanese Book May Be Inspiration for Dylan
10164 Songs," Kansascity.com,
9. juli
2003, tilgjengelig fra
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
69</a>.
10166 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2602821" href=
"#id2602821" class=
"para">208</a>]
</sup>
10168 "BBC Plans to Open Up Its Archive to the Public," pressemelding fra BBC,
10169 24. august
2003, tilgjengelig fra
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
70</a>.
10170 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2602842" href=
"#id2602842" class=
"para">209</a>]
</sup>
10173 "Creative Commons and Brazil," Creative Commons Weblog,
6. august
2003,
10174 tilgjengelig fra
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link
10176 </p></div></div></div><div class=
"chapter" title=
"Kapittel 16."><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h2 class=
"title"><a name=
"id2602879"></a>Kapittel
16.
</h2></div></div></div><p></p></div></div><div class=
"part" title=
"Del VI. Etterord"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h1 class=
"title"><a name=
"c-afterword"></a>Del VI. Etterord
</h1></div></div></div><div class=
"partintro" title=
"Etterord"><div></div><p>
10180 I hvert fall noen av de som har lest helt hit vil være enig med meg om at
10181 noe må gjøres for å endre retningen vi holder. Balansen i denne boken
10182 kartlegger hva som kan gjøres.
10184 I divide this map into two parts: that which anyone can do now, and that
10185 which requires the help of lawmakers. If there is one lesson that we can
10186 draw from the history of remaking common sense, it is that it requires
10187 remaking how many people think about the very same issue.
10189 That means this movement must begin in the streets. It must recruit a
10190 significant number of parents, teachers, librarians, creators, authors,
10191 musicians, filmmakers, scientists
—all to tell this story in their own
10192 words, and to tell their neighbors why this battle is so important.
10194 Once this movement has its effect in the streets, it has some hope of having
10195 an effect in Washington. We are still a democracy. What people think
10196 matters. Not as much as it should, at least when an RCA stands opposed, but
10197 still, it matters. And thus, in the second part below, I sketch changes that
10198 Congress could make to better secure a free culture.
10199 </p><div class=
"section" title=
"Oss, nå"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h2 class=
"title" style=
"clear: both"><a name=
"usnow"></a>Oss, nå
</h2></div></div></div><p>
10200 Common sense is with the copyright warriors because the debate so far has
10201 been framed at the extremes
—as a grand either/or: either property or
10202 anarchy, either total control or artists won't be paid. If that really is
10203 the choice, then the warriors should win.
10205 The mistake here is the error of the excluded middle. There are extremes in
10206 this debate, but the extremes are not all that there is. There are those who
10207 believe in maximal copyright
—"All Rights Reserved"
— and those
10208 who reject copyright
—"No Rights Reserved." The "All Rights Reserved"
10209 sorts believe that you should ask permission before you "use" a copyrighted
10210 work in any way. The "No Rights Reserved" sorts believe you should be able
10211 to do with content as you wish, regardless of whether you have permission or
10215 When the Internet was first born, its initial architecture effectively
10216 tilted in the "no rights reserved" direction. Content could be copied
10217 perfectly and cheaply; rights could not easily be controlled. Thus,
10218 regardless of anyone's desire, the effective regime of copyright under the
10219 original design of the Internet was "no rights reserved." Content was
10220 "taken" regardless of the rights. Any rights were effectively unprotected.
10222 This initial character produced a reaction (opposite, but not quite equal)
10223 by copyright owners. That reaction has been the topic of this book. Through
10224 legislation, litigation, and changes to the network's design, copyright
10225 holders have been able to change the essential character of the environment
10226 of the original Internet. If the original architecture made the effective
10227 default "no rights reserved," the future architecture will make the
10228 effective default "all rights reserved." The architecture and law that
10229 surround the Internet's design will increasingly produce an environment
10230 where all use of content requires permission. The "cut and paste" world
10231 that defines the Internet today will become a "get permission to cut and
10232 paste" world that is a creator's nightmare.
10234 What's needed is a way to say something in the middle
—neither "all
10235 rights reserved" nor "no rights reserved" but "some rights reserved"
—
10236 and thus a way to respect copyrights but enable creators to free content as
10237 they see fit. In other words, we need a way to restore a set of freedoms
10238 that we could just take for granted before.
10239 </p><div class=
"section" title=
"Gjenoppbygging av friheter som tidligere var antatt: Eksempler"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h3 class=
"title"><a name=
"examples"></a>Gjenoppbygging av friheter som tidligere var antatt: Eksempler
</h3></div></div></div><p>
10240 If you step back from the battle I've been describing here, you will
10241 recognize this problem from other contexts. Think about privacy. Before the
10242 Internet, most of us didn't have to worry much about data about our lives
10243 that we broadcast to the world. If you walked into a bookstore and browsed
10244 through some of the works of Karl Marx, you didn't need to worry about
10245 explaining your browsing habits to your neighbors or boss. The "privacy" of
10246 your browsing habits was assured.
10248 Hva gjorde at det var sikret?
10250 Well, if we think in terms of the modalities I described in chapter
10, your
10251 privacy was assured because of an inefficient architecture for gathering
10252 data and hence a market constraint (cost) on anyone who wanted to gather
10253 that data. If you were a suspected spy for North Korea, working for the CIA,
10254 no doubt your privacy would not be assured. But that's because the CIA
10255 would (we hope) find it valuable enough to spend the thousands required to
10256 track you. But for most of us (again, we can hope), spying doesn't pay. The
10257 highly inefficient architecture of real space means we all enjoy a fairly
10258 robust amount of privacy. That privacy is guaranteed to us by friction. Not
10259 by law (there is no law protecting "privacy" in public places), and in many
10260 places, not by norms (snooping and gossip are just fun), but instead, by the
10261 costs that friction imposes on anyone who would want to spy.
10262 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2603042"></a><p>
10263 Enter the Internet, where the cost of tracking browsing in particular has
10264 become quite tiny. If you're a customer at Amazon, then as you browse the
10265 pages, Amazon collects the data about what you've looked at. You know this
10266 because at the side of the page, there's a list of "recently viewed"
10267 pages. Now, because of the architecture of the Net and the function of
10268 cookies on the Net, it is easier to collect the data than not. The friction
10269 has disappeared, and hence any "privacy" protected by the friction
10272 Amazon, of course, is not the problem. But we might begin to worry about
10273 libraries. If you're one of those crazy lefties who thinks that people
10274 should have the "right" to browse in a library without the government
10275 knowing which books you look at (I'm one of those lefties, too), then this
10276 change in the technology of monitoring might concern you. If it becomes
10277 simple to gather and sort who does what in electronic spaces, then the
10278 friction-induced privacy of yesterday disappears.
10281 It is this reality that explains the push of many to define "privacy" on the
10282 Internet. It is the recognition that technology can remove what friction
10283 before gave us that leads many to push for laws to do what friction
10284 did.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2603080" href=
"#ftn.id2603080" class=
"footnote">210</a>]
</sup> And whether you're in favor of
10285 those laws or not, it is the pattern that is important here. We must take
10286 affirmative steps to secure a kind of freedom that was passively provided
10287 before. A change in technology now forces those who believe in privacy to
10288 affirmatively act where, before, privacy was given by default.
10290 A similar story could be told about the birth of the free software
10291 movement. When computers with software were first made available
10292 commercially, the software
—both the source code and the
10293 binaries
— was free. You couldn't run a program written for a Data
10294 General machine on an IBM machine, so Data General and IBM didn't care much
10295 about controlling their software.
10296 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2603115"></a><p>
10297 Dette var verden Richard Stallman ble født inn i, og mens han var forsker
10298 ved MIT, lærte han til å elske samfunnet som utviklet seg når en var fri til
10299 å utforske og fikle med programvaren som kjørte på datamaskiner. Av den
10300 smarte sorten selv, og en talentfull programmerer, begynte Stallman å basere
10301 seg frihet til å legge til eller endre på andre personers arbeid.
10303 In an academic setting, at least, that's not a terribly radical idea. In a
10304 math department, anyone would be free to tinker with a proof that someone
10305 offered. If you thought you had a better way to prove a theorem, you could
10306 take what someone else did and change it. In a classics department, if you
10307 believed a colleague's translation of a recently discovered text was flawed,
10308 you were free to improve it. Thus, to Stallman, it seemed obvious that you
10309 should be free to tinker with and improve the code that ran a machine. This,
10310 too, was knowledge. Why shouldn't it be open for criticism like anything
10313 No one answered that question. Instead, the architecture of revenue for
10314 computing changed. As it became possible to import programs from one system
10315 to another, it became economically attractive (at least in the view of some)
10316 to hide the code of your program. So, too, as companies started selling
10317 peripherals for mainframe systems. If I could just take your printer driver
10318 and copy it, then that would make it easier for me to sell a printer to the
10319 market than it was for you.
10322 Thus, the practice of proprietary code began to spread, and by the early
10323 1980s, Stallman found himself surrounded by proprietary code. The world of
10324 free software had been erased by a change in the economics of computing. And
10325 as he believed, if he did nothing about it, then the freedom to change and
10326 share software would be fundamentally weakened.
10328 Therefore, in
1984, Stallman began a project to build a free operating
10329 system, so that at least a strain of free software would survive. That was
10330 the birth of the GNU project, into which Linus Torvalds's "Linux" kernel was
10331 added to produce the GNU/Linux operating system.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2603187"></a>
10333 Stallman's technique was to use copyright law to build a world of software
10334 that must be kept free. Software licensed under the Free Software
10335 Foundation's GPL cannot be modified and distributed unless the source code
10336 for that software is made available as well. Thus, anyone building upon
10337 GPL'd software would have to make their buildings free as well. This would
10338 assure, Stallman believed, that an ecology of code would develop that
10339 remained free for others to build upon. His fundamental goal was freedom;
10340 innovative creative code was a byproduct.
10342 Stallman was thus doing for software what privacy advocates now do for
10343 privacy. He was seeking a way to rebuild a kind of freedom that was taken
10344 for granted before. Through the affirmative use of licenses that bind
10345 copyrighted code, Stallman was affirmatively reclaiming a space where free
10346 software would survive. He was actively protecting what before had been
10347 passively guaranteed.
10349 Finally, consider a very recent example that more directly resonates with
10350 the story of this book. This is the shift in the way academic and scientific
10351 journals are produced.
10354 As digital technologies develop, it is becoming obvious to many that
10355 printing thousands of copies of journals every month and sending them to
10356 libraries is perhaps not the most efficient way to distribute
10357 knowledge. Instead, journals are increasingly becoming electronic, and
10358 libraries and their users are given access to these electronic journals
10359 through password-protected sites. Something similar to this has been
10360 happening in law for almost thirty years: Lexis and Westlaw have had
10361 electronic versions of case reports available to subscribers to their
10362 service. Although a Supreme Court opinion is not copyrighted, and anyone is
10363 free to go to a library and read it, Lexis and Westlaw are also free to
10364 charge users for the privilege of gaining access to that Supreme Court
10365 opinion through their respective services.
10367 There's nothing wrong in general with this, and indeed, the ability to
10368 charge for access to even public domain materials is a good incentive for
10369 people to develop new and innovative ways to spread knowledge. The law has
10370 agreed, which is why Lexis and Westlaw have been allowed to flourish. And if
10371 there's nothing wrong with selling the public domain, then there could be
10372 nothing wrong, in principle, with selling access to material that is not in
10375 But what if the only way to get access to social and scientific data was
10376 through proprietary services? What if no one had the ability to browse this
10377 data except by paying for a subscription?
10379 As many are beginning to notice, this is increasingly the reality with
10380 scientific journals. When these journals were distributed in paper form,
10381 libraries could make the journals available to anyone who had access to the
10382 library. Thus, patients with cancer could become cancer experts because the
10383 library gave them access. Or patients trying to understand the risks of a
10384 certain treatment could research those risks by reading all available
10385 articles about that treatment. This freedom was therefore a function of the
10386 institution of libraries (norms) and the technology of paper journals
10387 (architecture)
—namely, that it was very hard to control access to a
10390 As journals become electronic, however, the publishers are demanding that
10391 libraries not give the general public access to the journals. This means
10392 that the freedoms provided by print journals in public libraries begin to
10393 disappear. Thus, as with privacy and with software, a changing technology
10394 and market shrink a freedom taken for granted before.
10396 This shrinking freedom has led many to take affirmative steps to restore the
10397 freedom that has been lost. The Public Library of Science (PLoS), for
10398 example, is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making scientific research
10399 available to anyone with a Web connection. Authors of scientific work submit
10400 that work to the Public Library of Science. That work is then subject to
10401 peer review. If accepted, the work is then deposited in a public, electronic
10402 archive and made permanently available for free. PLoS also sells a print
10403 version of its work, but the copyright for the print journal does not
10404 inhibit the right of anyone to redistribute the work for free.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2603298"></a>
10406 This is one of many such efforts to restore a freedom taken for granted
10407 before, but now threatened by changing technology and markets. There's no
10408 doubt that this alternative competes with the traditional publishers and
10409 their efforts to make money from the exclusive distribution of content. But
10410 competition in our tradition is presumptively a good
—especially when
10411 it helps spread knowledge and science.
10412 </p></div><div class=
"section" title=
"Gjenoppbyggeing av fri kultur: En idé"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h3 class=
"title"><a name=
"oneidea"></a>Gjenoppbyggeing av fri kultur: En idé
</h3></div></div></div><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"idxcc"></a><p>
10413 The same strategy could be applied to culture, as a response to the
10414 increasing control effected through law and technology.
10416 Enter the Creative Commons. The Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation
10417 established in Massachusetts, but with its home at Stanford University. Its
10418 aim is to build a layer of
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>reasonable
</em></span> copyright on top
10419 of the extremes that now reign. It does this by making it easy for people to
10420 build upon other people's work, by making it simple for creators to express
10421 the freedom for others to take and build upon their work. Simple tags, tied
10422 to human-readable descriptions, tied to bulletproof licenses, make this
10426 <span class=
"emphasis"><em>Simple
</em></span>—which means without a middleman, or
10427 without a lawyer. By developing a free set of licenses that people can
10428 attach to their content, Creative Commons aims to mark a range of content
10429 that can easily, and reliably, be built upon. These tags are then linked to
10430 machine-readable versions of the license that enable computers automatically
10431 to identify content that can easily be shared. These three expressions
10432 together
—a legal license, a human-readable description, and
10433 machine-readable tags
—constitute a Creative Commons license. A
10434 Creative Commons license constitutes a grant of freedom to anyone who
10435 accesses the license, and more importantly, an expression of the ideal that
10436 the person associated with the license believes in something different than
10437 the "All" or "No" extremes. Content is marked with the CC mark, which does
10438 not mean that copyright is waived, but that certain freedoms are given.
10440 These freedoms are beyond the freedoms promised by fair use. Their precise
10441 contours depend upon the choices the creator makes. The creator can choose a
10442 license that permits any use, so long as attribution is given. She can
10443 choose a license that permits only noncommercial use. She can choose a
10444 license that permits any use so long as the same freedoms are given to other
10445 uses ("share and share alike"). Or any use so long as no derivative use is
10446 made. Or any use at all within developing nations. Or any sampling use, so
10447 long as full copies are not made. Or lastly, any educational use.
10449 These choices thus establish a range of freedoms beyond the default of
10450 copyright law. They also enable freedoms that go beyond traditional fair
10451 use. And most importantly, they express these freedoms in a way that
10452 subsequent users can use and rely upon without the need to hire a
10453 lawyer. Creative Commons thus aims to build a layer of content, governed by
10454 a layer of reasonable copyright law, that others can build upon. Voluntary
10455 choice of individuals and creators will make this content available. And
10456 that content will in turn enable us to rebuild a public domain.
10458 This is just one project among many within the Creative Commons. And of
10459 course, Creative Commons is not the only organization pursuing such
10460 freedoms. But the point that distinguishes the Creative Commons from many is
10461 that we are not interested only in talking about a public domain or in
10462 getting legislators to help build a public domain. Our aim is to build a
10463 movement of consumers and producers of content ("content conducers," as
10464 attorney Mia Garlick calls them) who help build the public domain and, by
10465 their work, demonstrate the importance of the public domain to other
10466 creativity.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2603433"></a>
10468 The aim is not to fight the "All Rights Reserved" sorts. The aim is to
10469 complement them. The problems that the law creates for us as a culture are
10470 produced by insane and unintended consequences of laws written centuries
10471 ago, applied to a technology that only Jefferson could have imagined. The
10472 rules may well have made sense against a background of technologies from
10473 centuries ago, but they do not make sense against the background of digital
10474 technologies. New rules
—with different freedoms, expressed in ways so
10475 that humans without lawyers can use them
—are needed. Creative Commons
10476 gives people a way effectively to begin to build those rules.
10478 Why would creators participate in giving up total control? Some participate
10479 to better spread their content. Cory Doctorow, for example, is a science
10480 fiction author. His first novel,
<em class=
"citetitle">Down and Out in the Magic
10481 Kingdom
</em>, was released on-line and for free, under a Creative
10482 Commons license, on the same day that it went on sale in bookstores.
10484 Why would a publisher ever agree to this? I suspect his publisher reasoned
10485 like this: There are two groups of people out there: (
1) those who will buy
10486 Cory's book whether or not it's on the Internet, and (
2) those who may never
10487 hear of Cory's book, if it isn't made available for free on the
10488 Internet. Some part of (
1) will download Cory's book instead of buying
10489 it. Call them bad-(
1)s. Some part of (
2) will download Cory's book, like
10490 it, and then decide to buy it. Call them (
2)-goods. If there are more
10491 (
2)-goods than bad-(
1)s, the strategy of releasing Cory's book free on-line
10492 will probably
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>increase
</em></span> sales of Cory's book.
10494 Indeed, the experience of his publisher clearly supports that conclusion.
10495 The book's first printing was exhausted months before the publisher had
10496 expected. This first novel of a science fiction author was a total success.
10499 The idea that free content might increase the value of nonfree content was
10500 confirmed by the experience of another author. Peter Wayner, who wrote a
10501 book about the free software movement titled
<em class=
"citetitle">Free for
10502 All
</em>, made an electronic version of his book free on-line under a
10503 Creative Commons license after the book went out of print. He then monitored
10504 used book store prices for the book. As predicted, as the number of
10505 downloads increased, the used book price for his book increased, as well.
10507 These are examples of using the Commons to better spread proprietary
10508 content. I believe that is a wonderful and common use of the Commons. There
10509 are others who use Creative Commons licenses for other reasons. Many who use
10510 the "sampling license" do so because anything else would be
10511 hypocritical. The sampling license says that others are free, for commercial
10512 or noncommercial purposes, to sample content from the licensed work; they
10513 are just not free to make full copies of the licensed work available to
10514 others. This is consistent with their own art
—they, too, sample from
10515 others. Because the
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>legal
</em></span> costs of sampling are so high
10516 (Walter Leaphart, manager of the rap group Public Enemy, which was born
10517 sampling the music of others, has stated that he does not "allow" Public
10518 Enemy to sample anymore, because the legal costs are so high
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2603517" href=
"#ftn.id2603517" class=
"footnote">211</a>]
</sup>), these artists release into the creative
10519 environment content that others can build upon, so that their form of
10520 creativity might grow.
10522 Finally, there are many who mark their content with a Creative Commons
10523 license just because they want to express to others the importance of
10524 balance in this debate. If you just go along with the system as it is, you
10525 are effectively saying you believe in the "All Rights Reserved" model. Good
10526 for you, but many do not. Many believe that however appropriate that rule is
10527 for Hollywood and freaks, it is not an appropriate description of how most
10528 creators view the rights associated with their content. The Creative Commons
10529 license expresses this notion of "Some Rights Reserved," and gives many the
10530 chance to say it to others.
10533 In the first six months of the Creative Commons experiment, over
1 million
10534 objects were licensed with these free-culture licenses. The next step is
10535 partnerships with middleware content providers to help them build into their
10536 technologies simple ways for users to mark their content with Creative
10537 Commons freedoms. Then the next step is to watch and celebrate creators who
10538 build content based upon content set free.
10540 These are first steps to rebuilding a public domain. They are not mere
10541 arguments; they are action. Building a public domain is the first step to
10542 showing people how important that domain is to creativity and
10543 innovation. Creative Commons relies upon voluntary steps to achieve this
10544 rebuilding. They will lead to a world in which more than voluntary steps are
10547 Creative Commons is just one example of voluntary efforts by individuals and
10548 creators to change the mix of rights that now govern the creative field. The
10549 project does not compete with copyright; it complements it. Its aim is not
10550 to defeat the rights of authors, but to make it easier for authors and
10551 creators to exercise their rights more flexibly and cheaply. That
10552 difference, we believe, will enable creativity to spread more easily.
10553 </p><a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2603597"></a></div></div><div class=
"section" title=
"Dem, snart"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h2 class=
"title" style=
"clear: both"><a name=
"themsoon"></a>Dem, snart
</h2></div></div></div><p>
10554 We will not reclaim a free culture by individual action alone. It will also
10555 take important reforms of laws. We have a long way to go before the
10556 politicians will listen to these ideas and implement these reforms. But
10557 that also means that we have time to build awareness around the changes that
10560 In this chapter, I outline five kinds of changes: four that are general, and
10561 one that's specific to the most heated battle of the day, music. Each is a
10562 step, not an end. But any of these steps would carry us a long way to our
10564 </p><div class=
"section" title=
"1. Flere formaliteter"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h3 class=
"title"><a name=
"formalities"></a>1. Flere formaliteter
</h3></div></div></div><p>
10565 If you buy a house, you have to record the sale in a deed. If you buy land
10566 upon which to build a house, you have to record the purchase in a deed. If
10567 you buy a car, you get a bill of sale and register the car. If you buy an
10568 airplane ticket, it has your name on it.
10572 These are all formalities associated with property. They are requirements
10573 that we all must bear if we want our property to be protected.
10575 In contrast, under current copyright law, you automatically get a copyright,
10576 regardless of whether you comply with any formality. You don't have to
10577 register. You don't even have to mark your content. The default is control,
10578 and "formalities" are banished.
10582 As I suggested in chapter
10, the motivation to abolish formalities was a
10583 good one. In the world before digital technologies, formalities imposed a
10584 burden on copyright holders without much benefit. Thus, it was progress when
10585 the law relaxed the formal requirements that a copyright owner must bear to
10586 protect and secure his work. Those formalities were getting in the way.
10588 But the Internet changes all this. Formalities today need not be a
10589 burden. Rather, the world without formalities is the world that burdens
10590 creativity. Today, there is no simple way to know who owns what, or with
10591 whom one must deal in order to use or build upon the creative work of
10592 others. There are no records, there is no system to trace
— there is no
10593 simple way to know how to get permission. Yet given the massive increase in
10594 the scope of copyright's rule, getting permission is a necessary step for
10595 any work that builds upon our past. And thus, the
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>lack
</em></span>
10596 of formalities forces many into silence where they otherwise could speak.
10598 The law should therefore change this requirement
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2603696" href=
"#ftn.id2603696" class=
"footnote">212</a>]
</sup>—but it should not change it by going back to the old, broken
10599 system. We should require formalities, but we should establish a system that
10600 will create the incentives to minimize the burden of these formalities.
10602 The important formalities are three: marking copyrighted work, registering
10603 copyrights, and renewing the claim to copyright. Traditionally, the first of
10604 these three was something the copyright owner did; the second two were
10605 something the government did. But a revised system of formalities would
10606 banish the government from the process, except for the sole purpose of
10607 approving standards developed by others.
10608 </p><div class=
"section" title=
"Registrering og fornying"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h4 class=
"title"><a name=
"registration"></a>Registrering og fornying
</h4></div></div></div><p>
10609 Under the old system, a copyright owner had to file a registration with the
10610 Copyright Office to register or renew a copyright. When filing that
10611 registration, the copyright owner paid a fee. As with most government
10612 agencies, the Copyright Office had little incentive to minimize the burden
10613 of registration; it also had little incentive to minimize the fee. And as
10614 the Copyright Office is not a main target of government policymaking, the
10615 office has historically been terribly underfunded. Thus, when people who
10616 know something about the process hear this idea about formalities, their
10617 first reaction is panic
—nothing could be worse than forcing people to
10618 deal with the mess that is the Copyright Office.
10620 Yet it is always astonishing to me that we, who come from a tradition of
10621 extraordinary innovation in governmental design, can no longer think
10622 innovatively about how governmental functions can be designed. Just because
10623 there is a public purpose to a government role, it doesn't follow that the
10624 government must actually administer the role. Instead, we should be creating
10625 incentives for private parties to serve the public, subject to standards
10626 that the government sets.
10628 In the context of registration, one obvious model is the Internet. There
10629 are at least
32 million Web sites registered around the world. Domain name
10630 owners for these Web sites have to pay a fee to keep their registration
10631 alive. In the main top-level domains (.com, .org, .net), there is a central
10632 registry. The actual registrations are, however, performed by many competing
10633 registrars. That competition drives the cost of registering down, and more
10634 importantly, it drives the ease with which registration occurs up.
10637 We should adopt a similar model for the registration and renewal of
10638 copyrights. The Copyright Office may well serve as the central registry, but
10639 it should not be in the registrar business. Instead, it should establish a
10640 database, and a set of standards for registrars. It should approve
10641 registrars that meet its standards. Those registrars would then compete with
10642 one another to deliver the cheapest and simplest systems for registering and
10643 renewing copyrights. That competition would substantially lower the burden
10644 of this formality
—while producing a database of registrations that
10645 would facilitate the licensing of content.
10646 </p></div><div class=
"section" title=
"Merking"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h4 class=
"title"><a name=
"marking"></a>Merking
</h4></div></div></div><p>
10647 It used to be that the failure to include a copyright notice on a creative
10648 work meant that the copyright was forfeited. That was a harsh punishment for
10649 failing to comply with a regulatory rule
—akin to imposing the death
10650 penalty for a parking ticket in the world of creative rights. Here again,
10651 there is no reason that a marking requirement needs to be enforced in this
10652 way. And more importantly, there is no reason a marking requirement needs to
10653 be enforced uniformly across all media.
10655 The aim of marking is to signal to the public that this work is copyrighted
10656 and that the author wants to enforce his rights. The mark also makes it easy
10657 to locate a copyright owner to secure permission to use the work.
10659 One of the problems the copyright system confronted early on was that
10660 different copyrighted works had to be differently marked. It wasn't clear
10661 how or where a statue was to be marked, or a record, or a film. A new
10662 marking requirement could solve these problems by recognizing the
10663 differences in media, and by allowing the system of marking to evolve as
10664 technologies enable it to. The system could enable a special signal from the
10665 failure to mark
—not the loss of the copyright, but the loss of the
10666 right to punish someone for failing to get permission first.
10669 Let's start with the last point. If a copyright owner allows his work to be
10670 published without a copyright notice, the consequence of that failure need
10671 not be that the copyright is lost. The consequence could instead be that
10672 anyone has the right to use this work, until the copyright owner complains
10673 and demonstrates that it is his work and he doesn't give
10674 permission.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2603820" href=
"#ftn.id2603820" class=
"footnote">213</a>]
</sup> The meaning of an unmarked
10675 work would therefore be "use unless someone complains." If someone does
10676 complain, then the obligation would be to stop using the work in any new
10677 work from then on though no penalty would attach for existing uses. This
10678 would create a strong incentive for copyright owners to mark their work.
10680 That in turn raises the question about how work should best be marked. Here
10681 again, the system needs to adjust as the technologies evolve. The best way
10682 to ensure that the system evolves is to limit the Copyright Office's role to
10683 that of approving standards for marking content that have been crafted
10686 For example, if a recording industry association devises a method for
10687 marking CDs, it would propose that to the Copyright Office. The Copyright
10688 Office would hold a hearing, at which other proposals could be made. The
10689 Copyright Office would then select the proposal that it judged preferable,
10690 and it would base that choice
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>solely
</em></span> upon the
10691 consideration of which method could best be integrated into the registration
10692 and renewal system. We would not count on the government to innovate; but we
10693 would count on the government to keep the product of innovation in line with
10694 its other important functions.
10696 Finally, marking content clearly would simplify registration requirements.
10697 If photographs were marked by author and year, there would be little reason
10698 not to allow a photographer to reregister, for example, all photographs
10699 taken in a particular year in one quick step. The aim of the formality is
10700 not to burden the creator; the system itself should be kept as simple as
10703 The objective of formalities is to make things clear. The existing system
10704 does nothing to make things clear. Indeed, it seems designed to make things
10707 If formalities such as registration were reinstated, one of the most
10708 difficult aspects of relying upon the public domain would be removed. It
10709 would be simple to identify what content is presumptively free; it would be
10710 simple to identify who controls the rights for a particular kind of content;
10711 it would be simple to assert those rights, and to renew that assertion at
10712 the appropriate time.
10713 </p></div></div><div class=
"section" title=
"2. Kortere vernetid"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h3 class=
"title"><a name=
"shortterms"></a>2. Kortere vernetid
</h3></div></div></div><p>
10714 Vernetiden i opphavsretten har gått fra fjorten år til nittifem år der
10715 selskap har forfatterskapet , og livstiden til forfatteren pluss sytti år
10716 for individuelle forfattere.
10718 In
<em class=
"citetitle">The Future of Ideas
</em>, I proposed a
10719 seventy-five-year term, granted in five-year increments with a requirement
10720 of renewal every five years. That seemed radical enough at the time. But
10721 after we lost
<em class=
"citetitle">Eldred
</em>
10722 v.
<em class=
"citetitle">Ashcroft
</em>, the proposals became even more
10723 radical.
<em class=
"citetitle">The Economist
</em> endorsed a proposal for a
10724 fourteen-year copyright term.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2603944" href=
"#ftn.id2603944" class=
"footnote">214</a>]
</sup> Others
10725 have proposed tying the term to the term for patents.
10727 I agree with those who believe that we need a radical change in copyright's
10728 term. But whether fourteen years or seventy-five, there are four principles
10729 that are important to keep in mind about copyright terms.
10730 </p><div class=
"orderedlist"><ol class=
"orderedlist" type=
"1"><li class=
"listitem"><p>
10733 <span class=
"emphasis"><em>Keep it short:
</em></span> The term should be as long as necessary
10734 to give incentives to create, but no longer. If it were tied to very strong
10735 protections for authors (so authors were able to reclaim rights from
10736 publishers), rights to the same work (not derivative works) might be
10737 extended further. The key is not to tie the work up with legal regulations
10738 when it no longer benefits an author.
10739 </p></li><li class=
"listitem"><p>
10743 <span class=
"emphasis"><em>Gjør det enkelt:
</em></span> Skillelinjen mellom verker uten
10744 opphavsrettslig vern og innhold som er beskyttet må forbli klart. Advokater
10745 liker uklarheten som "rimelig bruk" og forskjellen mellom "idéer" og
10746 "uttrykk" har. Denne type lovverk gir dem en masse arbeid. Men de som
10747 skrev grunnloven hadde en enklere idé: vernet versus ikke vernet. Verdien av
10748 korte vernetider er at det er lite behov for å bygge inn unntak i
10749 opphavsretten når vernetiden holdes kort. En klar og aktiv "advokat-fri
10750 sone" gjør komplesiteten av "rimelig bruk" og "idé/uttrykk" mindre nødvendig
10753 </p></li><li class=
"listitem"><p>
10755 <span class=
"emphasis"><em>Keep it alive:
</em></span> Copyright should have to be renewed.
10756 Especially if the maximum term is long, the copyright owner should be
10757 required to signal periodically that he wants the protection continued. This
10758 need not be an onerous burden, but there is no reason this monopoly
10759 protection has to be granted for free. On average, it takes ninety minutes
10760 for a veteran to apply for a pension.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2604032" href=
"#ftn.id2604032" class=
"footnote">215</a>]
</sup>
10761 If we make veterans suffer that burden, I don't see why we couldn't require
10762 authors to spend ten minutes every fifty years to file a single form.
10763 <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2604054"></a>
10764 </p></li><li class=
"listitem"><p>
10767 <span class=
"emphasis"><em>Keep it prospective:
</em></span> Whatever the term of copyright
10768 should be, the clearest lesson that economists teach is that a term once
10769 given should not be extended. It might have been a mistake in
1923 for the
10770 law to offer authors only a fifty-six-year term. I don't think so, but it's
10771 possible. If it was a mistake, then the consequence was that we got fewer
10772 authors to create in
1923 than we otherwise would have. But we can't correct
10773 that mistake today by increasing the term. No matter what we do today, we
10774 will not increase the number of authors who wrote in
1923. Of course, we can
10775 increase the reward that those who write now get (or alternatively, increase
10776 the copyright burden that smothers many works that are today invisible). But
10777 increasing their reward will not increase their creativity in
1923. What's
10778 not done is not done, and there's nothing we can do about that now.
</p></li></ol></div><p>
10779 Disse endringene vil sammen gi en
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>gjennomsnittlig
</em></span>
10780 opphavsrettslig vernetid som er mye kortere enn den gjeldende vernetiden.
10781 Frem til
1976 var gjennomsnittelig vernetid kun
32.2 år. Vårt mål bør være
10784 Uten tvil vil ekstremistene kalle disse idéene "radikale". (Tross alt, så
10785 kaller jeg dem "ekstremister".) Men igjen, vernetiden jeg anbefalte var
10786 lengre enn vernetiden under Richard Nixon. hvor "radikalt" kan det være å be
10787 om en mer sjenerøs opphavsrettighet enn da Richard Nixon var president?
10788 </p></div><div class=
"section" title=
"3. Fri Bruk vs. rimelig bruk"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h3 class=
"title"><a name=
"freefairuse"></a>3. Fri Bruk vs. rimelig bruk
</h3></div></div></div><p>
10789 As I observed at the beginning of this book, property law originally granted
10790 property owners the right to control their property from the ground to the
10791 heavens. The airplane came along. The scope of property rights quickly
10792 changed. There was no fuss, no constitutional challenge. It made no sense
10793 anymore to grant that much control, given the emergence of that new
10796 Our Constitution gives Congress the power to give authors "exclusive right"
10797 to "their writings." Congress has given authors an exclusive right to "their
10798 writings" plus any derivative writings (made by others) that are
10799 sufficiently close to the author's original work. Thus, if I write a book,
10800 and you base a movie on that book, I have the power to deny you the right to
10801 release that movie, even though that movie is not "my writing."
10803 Congress granted the beginnings of this right in
1870, when it expanded the
10804 exclusive right of copyright to include a right to control translations and
10805 dramatizations of a work.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2604163" href=
"#ftn.id2604163" class=
"footnote">216</a>]
</sup> The courts
10806 have expanded it slowly through judicial interpretation ever since. This
10807 expansion has been commented upon by one of the law's greatest judges, Judge
10809 </p><div class=
"blockquote"><blockquote class=
"blockquote"><p>
10810 So inured have we become to the extension of the monopoly to a large range
10811 of so-called derivative works, that we no longer sense the oddity of
10812 accepting such an enlargement of copyright while yet intoning the
10813 abracadabra of idea and expression.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2604187" href=
"#ftn.id2604187" class=
"footnote">217</a>]
</sup>
10814 </p></blockquote></div><p>
10815 I think it's time to recognize that there are airplanes in this field and
10816 the expansiveness of these rights of derivative use no longer make
10817 sense. More precisely, they don't make sense for the period of time that a
10818 copyright runs. And they don't make sense as an amorphous grant. Consider
10819 each limitation in turn.
10821 <span class=
"emphasis"><em>Term:
</em></span> If Congress wants to grant a derivative right,
10822 then that right should be for a much shorter term. It makes sense to protect
10823 John Grisham's right to sell the movie rights to his latest novel (or at
10824 least I'm willing to assume it does); but it does not make sense for that
10825 right to run for the same term as the underlying copyright. The derivative
10826 right could be important in inducing creativity; it is not important long
10827 after the creative work is done.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2604217"></a>
10829 <span class=
"emphasis"><em>Scope:
</em></span> Likewise should the scope of derivative rights
10830 be narrowed. Again, there are some cases in which derivative rights are
10831 important. Those should be specified. But the law should draw clear lines
10832 around regulated and unregulated uses of copyrighted material. When all
10833 "reuse" of creative material was within the control of businesses, perhaps
10834 it made sense to require lawyers to negotiate the lines. It no longer makes
10835 sense for lawyers to negotiate the lines. Think about all the creative
10836 possibilities that digital technologies enable; now imagine pouring molasses
10837 into the machines. That's what this general requirement of permission does
10838 to the creative process. Smothers it.
10840 This was the point that Alben made when describing the making of the Clint
10841 Eastwood CD. While it makes sense to require negotiation for foreseeable
10842 derivative rights
—turning a book into a movie, or a poem into a
10843 musical score
—it doesn't make sense to require negotiation for the
10844 unforeseeable. Here, a statutory right would make much more sense.
10846 In each of these cases, the law should mark the uses that are protected, and
10847 the presumption should be that other uses are not protected. This is the
10848 reverse of the recommendation of my colleague Paul Goldstein.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2604260" href=
"#ftn.id2604260" class=
"footnote">218</a>]
</sup> His view is that the law should be written so that
10849 expanded protections follow expanded uses.
10851 Goldstein's analysis would make perfect sense if the cost of the legal
10852 system were small. But as we are currently seeing in the context of the
10853 Internet, the uncertainty about the scope of protection, and the incentives
10854 to protect existing architectures of revenue, combined with a strong
10855 copyright, weaken the process of innovation.
10858 The law could remedy this problem either by removing protection beyond the
10859 part explicitly drawn or by granting reuse rights upon certain statutory
10860 conditions. Either way, the effect would be to free a great deal of culture
10861 to others to cultivate. And under a statutory rights regime, that reuse
10862 would earn artists more income.
10863 </p></div><div class=
"section" title=
"4. Frigjør musikken—igjen"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h3 class=
"title"><a name=
"liberatemusic"></a>4. Frigjør musikken
—igjen
</h3></div></div></div><p>
10864 The battle that got this whole war going was about music, so it wouldn't be
10865 fair to end this book without addressing the issue that is, to most people,
10866 most pressing
—music. There is no other policy issue that better
10867 teaches the lessons of this book than the battles around the sharing of
10870 The appeal of file-sharing music was the crack cocaine of the Internet's
10871 growth. It drove demand for access to the Internet more powerfully than any
10872 other single application. It was the Internet's killer app
—possibly in
10873 two senses of that word. It no doubt was the application that drove demand
10874 for bandwidth. It may well be the application that drives demand for
10875 regulations that in the end kill innovation on the network.
10877 The aim of copyright, with respect to content in general and music in
10878 particular, is to create the incentives for music to be composed, performed,
10879 and, most importantly, spread. The law does this by giving an exclusive
10880 right to a composer to control public performances of his work, and to a
10881 performing artist to control copies of her performance.
10883 File-sharing networks complicate this model by enabling the spread of
10884 content for which the performer has not been paid. But of course, that's not
10885 all the file-sharing networks do. As I described in chapter
5, they enable
10886 four different kinds of sharing:
10887 </p><div class=
"orderedlist"><ol class=
"orderedlist" type=
"A"><li class=
"listitem"><p>
10890 Det er noen som bruker delingsnettverk som erstatninger for å kjøpe CDer.
10891 </p></li><li class=
"listitem"><p>
10894 There are also some who are using sharing networks to sample, on the way to
10896 </p></li><li class=
"listitem"><p>
10901 Det er mange som bruker fildelingsnettverk til å få tilgang til innhold som
10902 ikke lenger er i salg, men fortsatt er vernet av opphavsrett eller som ville
10903 ha vært altfor vanskelig å få kjøpt via nettet.
10904 </p></li><li class=
"listitem"><p>
10907 Det er mange som bruker fildelingsnettverk for å få tilgang til innhold som
10908 ikke er opphavsrettsbeskyttet, eller for å få tilgang som
10909 opphavsrettsinnehaveren åpenbart går god for.
10910 </p></li></ol></div><p>
10911 Any reform of the law needs to keep these different uses in focus. It must
10912 avoid burdening type D even if it aims to eliminate type A. The eagerness
10913 with which the law aims to eliminate type A, moreover, should depend upon
10914 the magnitude of type B. As with VCRs, if the net effect of sharing is
10915 actually not very harmful, the need for regulation is significantly
10918 As I said in chapter
5, the actual harm caused by sharing is controversial.
10919 For the purposes of this chapter, however, I assume the harm is real. I
10920 assume, in other words, that type A sharing is significantly greater than
10921 type B, and is the dominant use of sharing networks.
10923 Uansett, det er et avgjørende faktum om den gjeldende teknologiske
10924 omgivelsen som vi må huske på hvis vi skal forstå hvordan loven bør reagere.
10926 Today, file sharing is addictive. In ten years, it won't be. It is addictive
10927 today because it is the easiest way to gain access to a broad range of
10928 content. It won't be the easiest way to get access to a broad range of
10929 content in ten years. Today, access to the Internet is cumbersome and
10930 slow
—we in the United States are lucky to have broadband service at
10931 1.5 MBs, and very rarely do we get service at that speed both up and
10932 down. Although wireless access is growing, most of us still get access
10933 across wires. Most only gain access through a machine with a keyboard. The
10934 idea of the always on, always connected Internet is mainly just an idea.
10937 But it will become a reality, and that means the way we get access to the
10938 Internet today is a technology in transition. Policy makers should not make
10939 policy on the basis of technology in transition. They should make policy on
10940 the basis of where the technology is going. The question should not be, how
10941 should the law regulate sharing in this world? The question should be, what
10942 law will we require when the network becomes the network it is clearly
10943 becoming? That network is one in which every machine with electricity is
10944 essentially on the Net; where everywhere you are
—except maybe the
10945 desert or the Rockies
—you can instantaneously be connected to the
10946 Internet. Imagine the Internet as ubiquitous as the best cell-phone service,
10947 where with the flip of a device, you are connected.
10949 In that world, it will be extremely easy to connect to services that give
10950 you access to content on the fly
—such as Internet radio, content that
10951 is streamed to the user when the user demands. Here, then, is the critical
10952 point: When it is
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>extremely
</em></span> easy to connect to services
10953 that give access to content, it will be
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>easier
</em></span> to
10954 connect to services that give you access to content than it will be to
10955 download and store content
<span class=
"emphasis"><em>on the many devices you will have for
10956 playing content
</em></span>. It will be easier, in other words, to subscribe
10957 than it will be to be a database manager, as everyone in the
10958 download-sharing world of Napster-like technologies essentially is. Content
10959 services will compete with content sharing, even if the services charge
10960 money for the content they give access to. Already cell-phone services in
10961 Japan offer music (for a fee) streamed over cell phones (enhanced with plugs
10962 for headphones). The Japanese are paying for this content even though "free"
10963 content is available in the form of MP3s across the Web.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2604492" href=
"#ftn.id2604492" class=
"footnote">219</a>]
</sup>
10967 This point about the future is meant to suggest a perspective on the
10968 present: It is emphatically temporary. The "problem" with file
10969 sharing
—to the extent there is a real problem
—is a problem that
10970 will increasingly disappear as it becomes easier to connect to the
10971 Internet. And thus it is an extraordinary mistake for policy makers today
10972 to be "solving" this problem in light of a technology that will be gone
10973 tomorrow. The question should not be how to regulate the Internet to
10974 eliminate file sharing (the Net will evolve that problem away). The question
10975 instead should be how to assure that artists get paid, during this
10976 transition between twentieth-century models for doing business and
10977 twenty-first-century technologies.
10979 The answer begins with recognizing that there are different "problems" here
10980 to solve. Let's start with type D content
—uncopyrighted content or
10981 copyrighted content that the artist wants shared. The "problem" with this
10982 content is to make sure that the technology that would enable this kind of
10983 sharing is not rendered illegal. You can think of it this way: Pay phones
10984 are used to deliver ransom demands, no doubt. But there are many who need
10985 to use pay phones who have nothing to do with ransoms. It would be wrong to
10986 ban pay phones in order to eliminate kidnapping.
10988 Type C content raises a different "problem." This is content that was, at
10989 one time, published and is no longer available. It may be unavailable
10990 because the artist is no longer valuable enough for the record label he
10991 signed with to carry his work. Or it may be unavailable because the work is
10992 forgotten. Either way, the aim of the law should be to facilitate the access
10993 to this content, ideally in a way that returns something to the artist.
10995 Again, the model here is the used book store. Once a book goes out of print,
10996 it may still be available in libraries and used book stores. But libraries
10997 and used book stores don't pay the copyright owner when someone reads or
10998 buys an out-of-print book. That makes total sense, of course, since any
10999 other system would be so burdensome as to eliminate the possibility of used
11000 book stores' existing. But from the author's perspective, this "sharing" of
11001 his content without his being compensated is less than ideal.
11003 The model of used book stores suggests that the law could simply deem
11004 out-of-print music fair game. If the publisher does not make copies of the
11005 music available for sale, then commercial and noncommercial providers would
11006 be free, under this rule, to "share" that content, even though the sharing
11007 involved making a copy. The copy here would be incidental to the trade; in a
11008 context where commercial publishing has ended, trading music should be as
11009 free as trading books.
11014 Alternatively, the law could create a statutory license that would ensure
11015 that artists get something from the trade of their work. For example, if the
11016 law set a low statutory rate for the commercial sharing of content that was
11017 not offered for sale by a commercial publisher, and if that rate were
11018 automatically transferred to a trust for the benefit of the artist, then
11019 businesses could develop around the idea of trading this content, and
11020 artists would benefit from this trade.
11022 This system would also create an incentive for publishers to keep works
11023 available commercially. Works that are available commercially would not be
11024 subject to this license. Thus, publishers could protect the right to charge
11025 whatever they want for content if they kept the work commercially
11026 available. But if they don't keep it available, and instead, the computer
11027 hard disks of fans around the world keep it alive, then any royalty owed for
11028 such copying should be much less than the amount owed a commercial
11031 The hard case is content of types A and B, and again, this case is hard only
11032 because the extent of the problem will change over time, as the technologies
11033 for gaining access to content change. The law's solution should be as
11034 flexible as the problem is, understanding that we are in the middle of a
11035 radical transformation in the technology for delivering and accessing
11038 Så her er en løsning som i første omgang kan virke veldig undelig for begge
11039 sider i denne krigen, men som jeg tror vil gi mer mening når en får tenkt
11042 Stripped of the rhetoric about the sanctity of property, the basic claim of
11043 the content industry is this: A new technology (the Internet) has harmed a
11044 set of rights that secure copyright. If those rights are to be protected,
11045 then the content industry should be compensated for that harm. Just as the
11046 technology of tobacco harmed the health of millions of Americans, or the
11047 technology of asbestos caused grave illness to thousands of miners, so, too,
11048 has the technology of digital networks harmed the interests of the content
11053 Jeg elsker internett, så jeg liker ikke å sammenligne det med tobakk eller
11054 asbest. Men analogien er rimelig når en ser det fra lovens perspektiv. Og
11055 det foreslår en rimelig respons: I stedet for å forsøke å ødelegge internett
11056 eller p2p-teknologien som i dag skader innholdsleverandører på internett, så
11057 bør vi finne en relativt enkel måte å kompensere de som blir skadelidende.
11059 The idea would be a modification of a proposal that has been floated by
11060 Harvard law professor William Fisher.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2604656" href=
"#ftn.id2604656" class=
"footnote">220</a>]
</sup>
11061 Fisher suggests a very clever way around the current impasse of the
11062 Internet. Under his plan, all content capable of digital transmission would
11063 (
1) be marked with a digital watermark (don't worry about how easy it is to
11064 evade these marks; as you'll see, there's no incentive to evade them). Once
11065 the content is marked, then entrepreneurs would develop (
2) systems to
11066 monitor how many items of each content were distributed. On the basis of
11067 those numbers, then (
3) artists would be compensated. The compensation would
11068 be paid for by (
4) an appropriate tax.
11070 Fisher's proposal is careful and comprehensive. It raises a million
11071 questions, most of which he answers well in his upcoming book,
11072 <em class=
"citetitle">Promises to Keep
</em>. The modification that I would make
11073 is relatively simple: Fisher imagines his proposal replacing the existing
11074 copyright system. I imagine it complementing the existing system. The aim
11075 of the proposal would be to facilitate compensation to the extent that harm
11076 could be shown. This compensation would be temporary, aimed at facilitating
11077 a transition between regimes. And it would require renewal after a period of
11078 years. If it continues to make sense to facilitate free exchange of content,
11079 supported through a taxation system, then it can be continued. If this form
11080 of protection is no longer necessary, then the system could lapse into the
11081 old system of controlling access.
11084 Fisher would balk at the idea of allowing the system to lapse. His aim is
11085 not just to ensure that artists are paid, but also to ensure that the system
11086 supports the widest range of "semiotic democracy" possible. But the aims of
11087 semiotic democracy would be satisfied if the other changes I described were
11088 accomplished
—in particular, the limits on derivative uses. A system
11089 that simply charges for access would not greatly burden semiotic democracy
11090 if there were few limitations on what one was allowed to do with the content
11093 No doubt it would be difficult to calculate the proper measure of "harm" to
11094 an industry. But the difficulty of making that calculation would be
11095 outweighed by the benefit of facilitating innovation. This background system
11096 to compensate would also not need to interfere with innovative proposals
11097 such as Apple's MusicStore. As experts predicted when Apple launched the
11098 MusicStore, it could beat "free" by being easier than free is. This has
11099 proven correct: Apple has sold millions of songs at even the very high price
11100 of
99 cents a song. (At
99 cents, the cost is the equivalent of a per-song
11101 CD price, though the labels have none of the costs of a CD to pay.) Apple's
11102 move was countered by Real Networks, offering music at just
79 cents a
11103 song. And no doubt there will be a great deal of competition to offer and
11104 sell music on-line.
11106 This competition has already occurred against the background of "free" music
11107 from p2p systems. As the sellers of cable television have known for thirty
11108 years, and the sellers of bottled water for much more than that, there is
11109 nothing impossible at all about "competing with free." Indeed, if anything,
11110 the competition spurs the competitors to offer new and better products. This
11111 is precisely what the competitive market was to be about. Thus in Singapore,
11112 though piracy is rampant, movie theaters are often luxurious
—with
11113 "first class" seats, and meals served while you watch a movie
—as they
11114 struggle and succeed in finding ways to compete with "free."
11116 Dette konkurranseregimet, med en sikringsmekanisme å sikre at kunstnere ikke
11117 taper, ville bidra mye til nyskapning innen levering av
11118 innhold. Konkurransen ville fortsette å redusere type-A-deling. Det ville
11119 inspirere en ekstraordinær rekke av nye innovatører
—som ville ha
11120 retten til a bruke innhold, og ikke lenger frykte usikre og barbarisk
11121 strenge straffer fra loven.
11123 Oppsummert, så er dette mitt forslag:
11128 Internett er i endring. Vi bør ikke regulere en teknologi i endring. Vi bør
11129 i stedet regulere for å minimere skaden påført interesser som er berørt av
11130 denne teknologiske endringen, samtidig vi muliggjør, og oppmuntrer, den mest
11131 effektive teknologien vi kan lage.
11133 Vi kan minimere skaden og samtidig maksimere fordelen med innovasjon ved å
11134 </p><div class=
"orderedlist"><ol class=
"orderedlist" type=
"1"><li class=
"listitem"><p>
11137 garantere retten til å engasjere seg i type-D-deling;
11138 </p></li><li class=
"listitem"><p>
11141 tillate ikke-kommersiell type-C-deling uten erstatningsansvar, og
11142 kommersiell type-C-deling med en lav og fast rate fastsatt ved lov.
11143 </p></li><li class=
"listitem"><p>
11146 mens denne overgangen pågår, skattlegge og kompensere for type-A-deling, i
11147 den grad faktiske skade kan påvises.
11148 </p></li></ol></div><p>
11149 Men hva om "piratvirksomheten" ikke forsvinner? Hva om det finnes et
11150 konkurranseutsatt marked som tilbyr innhold til en lav kostnad, men et
11151 signifikant antall av forbrukere fortsetter å "ta" innhold uten å betale?
11152 Burde loven gjøre noe da?
11154 Ja, det bør den. Men, nok en gang, hva den bør gjøre avhenger hvordan
11155 realitetene utvikler seg. Disse endringene fjerner kanskje ikke all
11156 type-A-deling. Men det virkelige spørmålet er ikke om de eliminerer deling i
11157 abstrakt betydning. Det virkelige spørsmålet er hvilken effekt det har på
11158 markedet. Er det bedre (a) å ha en teknologi som er
95 prosent sikker og
11159 gir et marked av størrelse
<em class=
"citetitle">x
</em>, eller (b) å ha en
11160 teknologi som er
50 prosent sikker, og som gir et marked som er fem ganger
11161 større enn
<em class=
"citetitle">x
</em>? Mindre sikker kan gi mer uautorisert
11162 deling, men det vil sannsynligvis også gi et mye større marked for
11163 autorisert deling. Det viktigste er å sikre kunstneres kompensasjon uten å
11164 ødelegge internettet. Når det er på plass, kan det hende det er riktig å
11165 finne måter å spore opp de smålige piratene.
11168 Men vi er langt unna å spikke problemet ned til dette delsettet av
11169 type-A-delere. Og vårt fokus inntil er der bør ikke være å finne måter å
11170 ødelegge internettet. Var fokus inntil vi er der bør være hvordan sikre at
11171 artister får betalt, mens vi beskytter rommet for nyskapning og kreativitet
11172 som internettet er.
11173 </p></div><div class=
"section" title=
"5. Spark en masse advokater"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h3 class=
"title"><a name=
"firelawyers"></a>5. Spark en masse advokater
</h3></div></div></div><p>
11174 Jeg er en advokat. Jeg lever av å utdanne advokater. Jeg tror på loven. Jeg
11175 tror på opphavsrettsloven. Jeg har faktisk viet livet til å jobbe med loven,
11176 ikke fordi det er mye penger å tjene, men fordi det innebærer idealer som
11177 jeg elsker å leve opp til.
11179 Likevel har mye av denne boken vært kritikk av advokater, eller rollen
11180 advokater har spilt i denne debatten. Loven taler om idealer, mens det er
11181 min oppfatning av vår yrkesgruppe er blitt for knyttet til klienten. Og i
11182 en verden der rike klienter har sterke synspunkter vil uviljen hos vår
11183 yrkesgruppe til å stille spørsmål med eller protestere mot dette sterke
11184 synet ødelegge loven.
11186 Indisiene for slik bøyning er overbevisene. Jeg er angrepet som en
11187 "radikal" av mange innenfor yrket, og likevel er meningene jeg argumenterer
11188 for nøyaktig de meningene til mange av de mest moderate og betydningsfulle
11189 personene i historien til denne delen av loven. Mange trodde for eksempel at
11190 vår utfordring til lovforslaget om å utvide opphavsrettens vernetid var
11191 galskap. Mens bare tredve år siden mente den dominerende foreleser og
11192 utøver i opphavsrettsfeltet, Melville Nimmer, at den var
11193 åpenbar.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2605030" href=
"#ftn.id2605030" class=
"footnote">221</a>]
</sup>
11196 Min kritikk av rollen som advokater har spilt i denne debatten handler
11197 imidlertid ikke bare om en profesjonell skjevhet. Det handler enda viktigere
11198 om vår manglende evne til å faktisk ta inn over oss hva loven koster.
11200 Økonomer er forventet å være gode til å forstå utgifter og inntekter. Men
11201 som oftest antar økonomene uten peiling på hvordan det juridiske systemet
11202 egentlig fungerer, at transaksjonskostnaden i det juridiske systemet er
11203 lav.
<sup>[
<a name=
"id2605063" href=
"#ftn.id2605063" class=
"footnote">222</a>]
</sup> De ser et system som har
11204 eksistert i hundrevis av år, og de antar at det fungerer slik grunnskolens
11205 samfunnsfagsundervisning lærte dem at det fungerer.
11209 Men det juridiske systemet fungerer ikke. Eller for å være mer nøyaktig, det
11210 fungerer kun for de med mest ressurser. Det er ikke fordi systemet er
11211 korrupt. Jeg tror overhodet ikke vårt juridisk system (på føderalt nivå, i
11212 hvert fall) er korrupt. Jeg mener ganske enkelt at på grunn av at kostnadene
11213 med vårt juridiske systemet er så hårreisende høyt vil en praktisk talt
11214 aldri oppnå rettferdighet.
11216 Disse kostnadene forstyrrer fri kultur på mange vis. En advokats tid
11217 faktureres hos de største firmaene for mer enn $
400 pr. time. Hvor mye tid
11218 bør en slik advokat bruke på å lese sakene nøye, eller undersøke obskure
11219 rettskilder. Svaret er i økende grad: svært lite. Jussen er avhengig av
11220 nøye formulering og utvikling av doktrine, men nøye formulering og utvikling
11221 av doktrine er avhengig av nøyaktig arbeid. Men nøyaktig arbeid koster for
11222 mye, bortsett fra i de mest høyprofilerte og kostbare sakene.
11224 Kostbarheten, klomsetheten og tilfeldigheten til dette systemet håner vår
11225 tradisjon. Og advokater, såvel som akademikere, bør se det som sin plikt å
11226 endre hvordan loven praktiseres
— eller bedre, endre loven slik at den
11227 fungerer. Det er galt at systemet fungerer godt bare for den øverste
11228 1-prosenten av klientene. Det kan gjøres radikalt mer effektivt, og billig,
11229 og dermed radikalt mer rettferdig.
11231 Men inntil en slik reform er gjennomført, bør vi som samfunn holde lover
11232 unna områder der vi vet den bare vil skade. Og det er nettopp det loven
11233 altfor ofte vil gjøre hvis for mye av vår kultur er lovregulert.
11235 Tenk på de fantastiske tingene ditt barn kan gjøre eller lage med digital
11236 teknologi
—filmen, musikken, web-siden, bloggen. Eller tenk på de
11237 fantastiske tingene ditt fellesskap kunne få til med digital
11238 teknologi
—en wiki, oppsetting av låve, kampanje til å endre noe. Tenk
11239 på alle de kreative tingene, og tenk deretter på kald sirup helt inn i
11240 maskinene. Dette er hva et hvert regime som krever tillatelser fører
11241 til. Dette er virkeligheten slik den var i Brezhnevs Russland.
11244 Loven bør regulere i visse områder av kulturen
—men det bør regulere
11245 kultur bare der reguleringen bidrar positivt. Likevel tester advokater
11246 sjeldent sin kraft, eller kraften som de fremmer, mot dette enkle pragmatisk
11247 spørsmålet: "vil det bidra positivt?". Når de blir utfordret om det
11248 utvidede rekkevidden til loven, er advokat-svaret, "Hvorfor ikke?"
11250 Vi burde spørre: "Hvorfor?". Vis meg hvorfor din regulering av kultur er
11251 nødvendig og vis meg hvordan reguleringen bidrar positivt. Før du kan vise
11252 meg begge, holde advokatene din unna.
11253 </p></div></div><div class=
"toc"><p><b>Innholdsfortegnelse
</b></p><dl><dt><span class=
"chapter"><a href=
"#id2605235">17.
</a></span></dt></dl></div><div class=
"footnotes"><br><hr width=
"100" align=
"left"><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2603080" href=
"#id2603080" class=
"para">210</a>]
</sup>
11257 See, for example, Marc Rotenberg, "Fair Information Practices and the
11258 Architecture of Privacy (What Larry Doesn't Get),"
<em class=
"citetitle">Stanford
11259 Technology Law Review
</em> 1 (
2001): par.
6–18, available at
11260 <a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
72</a> (describing
11261 examples in which technology defines privacy policy). See also Jeffrey
11262 Rosen,
<em class=
"citetitle">The Naked Crowd: Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an
11263 Anxious Age
</em> (New York: Random House,
2004) (mapping tradeoffs
11264 between technology and privacy).
</p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2603517" href=
"#id2603517" class=
"para">211</a>]
</sup>
11268 <em class=
"citetitle">Willful Infringement: A Report from the Front Lines of the Real
11269 Culture Wars
</em> (
2003), produced by Jed Horovitz, directed by Greg
11270 Hittelman, a Fiat Lucre production, available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
72</a>.
11271 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2603696" href=
"#id2603696" class=
"para">212</a>]
</sup>
11274 The proposal I am advancing here would apply to American works only.
11275 Obviously, I believe it would be beneficial for the same idea to be adopted
11276 by other countries as well.
</p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2603820" href=
"#id2603820" class=
"para">213</a>]
</sup>
11279 There would be a complication with derivative works that I have not solved
11280 here. In my view, the law of derivatives creates a more complicated system
11281 than is justified by the marginal incentive it creates.
11282 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2603944" href=
"#id2603944" class=
"para">214</a>]
</sup>
11286 "A Radical Rethink,"
<em class=
"citetitle">Economist
</em>,
366:
8308 (
25. januar
11287 2003):
15, tilgjengelig fra
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link
11289 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2604032" href=
"#id2604032" class=
"para">215</a>]
</sup>
11292 Department of Veterans Affairs, Veteran's Application for Compensation
11293 and/or Pension, VA Form
21-
526 (OMB Approved No.
2900-
0001), tilgjengelig
11294 fra
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
75</a>.
11295 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2604163" href=
"#id2604163" class=
"para">216</a>]
</sup>
11298 Benjamin Kaplan,
<em class=
"citetitle">An Unhurried View of Copyright
</em> (New
11299 York: Columbia University Press,
1967),
32.
11300 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2604187" href=
"#id2604187" class=
"para">217</a>]
</sup>
11303 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2604260" href=
"#id2604260" class=
"para">218</a>]
</sup>
11305 Paul Goldstein,
<em class=
"citetitle">Copyright's Highway: From Gutenberg to the
11306 Celestial Jukebox
</em> (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2003),
11307 187–216.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2603091"></a>
11308 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2604492" href=
"#id2604492" class=
"para">219</a>]
</sup>
11311 For eksempel, se, "Music Media Watch," The J@pan Inc. Newsletter,
3 April
11312 2002, tilgjengelig fra
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link
11314 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2604656" href=
"#id2604656" class=
"para">220</a>]
</sup>
11316 William Fisher,
<em class=
"citetitle">Digital Music: Problems and
11317 Possibilities
</em> (last revised:
10 October
2000), available at
11318 <a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
77</a>; William Fisher,
11319 <em class=
"citetitle">Promises to Keep: Technology, Law, and the Future of
11320 Entertainment
</em> (forthcoming) (Stanford: Stanford University
11321 Press,
2004), ch.
6, available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
78</a>. Professor Netanel has
11322 proposed a related idea that would exempt noncommercial sharing from the
11323 reach of copyright and would establish compensation to artists to balance
11324 any loss. See Neil Weinstock Netanel, "Impose a Noncommercial Use Levy to
11325 Allow Free P2P File Sharing," available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
79</a>. For other proposals,
11326 see Lawrence Lessig, "Who's Holding Back Broadband?"
<em class=
"citetitle">Washington
11327 Post
</em>,
8 January
2002, A17; Philip S. Corwin on behalf of Sharman
11328 Networks, A Letter to Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr., Chairman of the Senate
11329 Foreign Relations Committee,
26 February
2002, available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
80</a>; Serguei Osokine,
11330 <em class=
"citetitle">A Quick Case for Intellectual Property Use Fee
11331 (IPUF)
</em>,
3 March
2002, available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
81</a>; Jefferson Graham,
11332 "Kazaa, Verizon Propose to Pay Artists Directly,"
<em class=
"citetitle">USA
11333 Today
</em>,
13 May
2002, available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
82</a>; Steven M. Cherry,
11334 "Getting Copyright Right," IEEE Spectrum Online,
1 July
2002, available at
11335 <a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
83</a>; Declan
11336 McCullagh, "Verizon's Copyright Campaign," CNET News.com,
27 August
2002,
11337 available at
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
84</a>.
11338 Fisher's proposal is very similar to Richard Stallman's proposal for
11339 DAT. Unlike Fisher's, Stallman's proposal would not pay artists directly
11340 proportionally, though more popular artists would get more than the less
11341 popular. As is typical with Stallman, his proposal predates the current
11342 debate by about a decade. See
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
85</a>.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2604755"></a> <a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2604764"></a>
11343 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2605030" href=
"#id2605030" class=
"para">221</a>]
</sup>
11346 Lawrence Lessig, "Copyright's First Amendment" (Melville B. Nimmer Memorial
11347 Lecture),
<em class=
"citetitle">UCLA law Review
</em> 48 (
2001):
1057,
11349 </p></div><div class=
"footnote"><p><sup>[
<a name=
"ftn.id2605063" href=
"#id2605063" class=
"para">222</a>]
</sup>
11351 Et godt eksempel er arbeidet til professor Stan Liebowitz. Liebowitz bør få
11352 ros for sin nøye gjennomgang av data om opphavsrettsbrudd, som fikk ham til
11353 å stille spørsmål med sin egen uttalte posisjon
—to ganger. I starten
11354 predicated han at nedlasting ville påføre industrien vesentlig skade. Han
11355 endret så sitt syn etter i lys av dataene, og han har siden endret sitt syn
11356 på nytt. Sammenlign Stan J. Liebowitz,
<em class=
"citetitle">Rethinking the Network
11357 Economy: The True Forces That Drive the Digital Marketplace
</em> (New
11358 York: Amacom,
2002), (gikk igjennom hans originale syn men uttrykte skepsis)
11359 med Stan J. Liebowitz, "Will MP3s Annihilate the Record Industry?"
11360 artikkelutkast, juni
2003, tilgjengelig fra
<a class=
"ulink" href=
"http://free-culture.cc/notes/" target=
"_top">link #
86</a>. Den nøye analysen til
11361 Liebowitz er ekstremt verdifull i sin estimering av effekten av
11362 fildelingsteknologi. Etter mitt syn underestimerer han forøvrig kostnaden
11363 til det juridiske system. Se, for eksempel,
11364 <em class=
"citetitle">Rethinking
</em>,
174–76.
<a class=
"indexterm" name=
"id2605040"></a>
11365 </p></div></div></div><div class=
"chapter" title=
"Kapittel 17."><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h2 class=
"title"><a name=
"id2605235"></a>Kapittel
17.
</h2></div></div></div><p></p></div></div><div class=
"chapter" title=
"Kapittel 18. Notater"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h2 class=
"title"><a name=
"c-notes"></a>Kapittel
18. Notater
</h2></div></div></div><p>
11366 I denne teksten er det referanser til lenker på verdensveven. Og som alle
11367 som har forsøkt å bruke nettet vet, så vil disse lenkene være svært
11368 ustabile. Jeg har forsøkt å motvirke denne ustabiliteten ved å omdirigere
11369 lesere til den originale kilden gjennom en nettside som hører til denne
11370 boken. For hver lenke under, så kan du gå til http://free-culture.cc/notes
11371 og finne den originale kilden ved å klikke på nummeret etter #-tegnet. Hvis
11372 den originale lenken fortsatt er i live, så vil du bli omdirigert til den
11373 lenken. Hvis den originale lenken har forsvunnet, så vil du bli omdirigert
11374 til en passende referanse til materialet.
11375 </p></div><div class=
"chapter" title=
"Kapittel 19. Takk til"><div class=
"titlepage"><div><div><h2 class=
"title"><a name=
"c-acknowledgments"></a>Kapittel
19. Takk til
</h2></div></div></div><p>
11376 Denne boken er produktet av en lang og så langt mislykket kamp som begynte
11377 da jeg leste om Eric Eldreds krig for å sørge for at bøker forble
11378 frie. Eldreds innsats bidro til å lansere en bevegelse, fri
11379 kultur-bevegelsen, og denne boken er tilegnet ham.
11381 Jeg fikk veiledning på ulike steder fra venner og akademikere, inkludert
11382 Glenn Brown, Peter DiCola, Jennifer Mnookin, Richard Posner, Mark Rose og
11383 Kathleen Sullivan. Og jeg fikk korreksjoner og veiledning fra mange
11384 fantastiske studenter ved Stanford Law School og Stanford University. Det
11385 inkluderer Andrew B. Coan, John Eden, James P. Fellers, Christopher
11386 Guzelian, Erica Goldberg, Robert Hallman, Andrew Harris, Matthew Kahn,
11387 Brian-Link, Ohad Mayblum, Alina Ng og Erica Platt. Jeg er særlig takknemlig
11388 overfor Catherine Crump og Harry Surden, som hjalp til med å styre deres
11389 forskning og til Laura Lynch, som briljant håndterte hæren de samlet, samt
11390 bidro med sitt egen kritisk blikk på mye av dette.
11393 Yuko Noguchi hjalp meg å forstå lovene i Japan, så vel som Japans
11394 kultur. Jeg er henne takknemlig, og til de mange i Japan som hjalp meg med
11395 forundersøkelsene til denne boken: Joi Ito, Takayuki Matsutani, Naoto
11396 Misaki, Michihiro Sasaki, Hiromichi Tanaka, Hiroo Yamagata og Yoshihiro
11397 Yonezawa. Jeg er også takknemlig til professor Nobuhiro Nakayama og Tokyo
11398 University Business Law Center, som ga meg muligheten til å bruke tid i
11399 Japan, og Tadashi Shiraishi og Kiyokazu Yamagami for deres generøse hjelp
11402 Dette er de tradisjonelle former for hjelp som akademikere regelmessig
11403 trekker på. Men i tillegg til dem, har Internett gjort det mulig å motta råd
11404 og korrigering fra mange som jeg har aldri møtt. Blant de som har svart med
11405 svært nyttig råd etter forespørsler om boken på bloggen min er Dr. Muhammed
11406 Al-Ubaydli, David Gerstein og Peter Dimauro, I tillegg en lang liste med de
11407 som hadde spesifikke ideer om måter å utvikle mine argumenter på. De
11408 inkluderte Richard Bondi, Steven Cherry, David Coe, Nik Cubrilovic, Bob
11409 Devine, Charles Eicher, Thomas Guida, Elihu M. Gerson, Jeremy Hunsinger,
11410 Vaughn Iverson, John Karabaic, Jeff Keltner, James Lindenschmidt,
11411 K. L. Mann, Mark Manning, Nora McCauley, Jeffrey McHugh, Evan McMullen, Fred
11412 Norton, John Pormann, Pedro A. D. Rezende, Shabbir Safdar, Saul Schleimer,
11413 Clay Shirky, Adam Shostack, Kragen Sitaker, Chris Smith, Bruce Steinberg,
11414 Andrzej Jan Taramina, Sean Walsh, Matt Wasserman, Miljenko Williams, "Wink,"
11415 Roger Wood, "Ximmbo da Jazz," og Richard Yanco. (jeg beklager hvis jeg gikk
11416 glipp av noen, med datamaskiner kommer feil og en krasj i e-postsystemet
11417 mitt gjorde at jeg mistet en haug med flotte svar.)
11419 Richard Stallman og Michael Carroll har begge lest hele boken i utkast, og
11420 hver av dem har bidratt med svært nyttige korreksjoner og råd. Michael hjalp
11421 meg å se mer tydelig betydningen av regulering for avledede verker . Og
11422 Richard korrigerte en pinlig stor mengde feil. Selv om mitt arbeid er
11423 delvis inspirert av Stallmans, er han ikke enig med meg på vesentlige steder
11426 Til slutt, og for evig, er jeg Bettina takknemlig, som alltid har insistert
11427 på at det ville være endeløs lykke utenfor disse kampene, og som alltid har
11428 hatt rett. Denne trege eleven er som alltid takknemlig for hennes
11429 evigvarende tålmodighet og kjærlighet.
11430 </p></div></div></body></html>
projects / text-free-culture-lessig.git / blob