It’s About Rights
Friday, January 30th, 2009 by Patrick Ross
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Here’s a recent piece of prose from an accomplished writer, Cory Doctorow:
The Internet’s a single wire that delivers freedom of speech, of assembly and of the press — it’s a conduit for civic engagement, health care, employment, education, distant family, love and life. Disconnecting people from the Internet on the basis of an unsubstantiated accusation, without a court order, without a chance to defend yourself against your accusers, without a chance to see and challenge the evidence — it’s positively medieval.
Agreed.
Well, I think the “medieval” reference is a bit of hyperbole, we’re not talking about plagues and trebuchets. But the real problem is, what Mr. Doctorow is setting up here is a straw man. Under any scenario involving copyright owners and Internet service providers working together to reduce infringement, any accusation would be substantiated. Copyright owners are not going to throw darts at a wall scrawled with IP addresses and report those unfortunate ones poked to an ISP. No, they will focus on the few that seem to be egregiously infringing and report those. No reason to raise the ire of an ISP, thus discouraging it from cooperating fully in the future.
Also, it is false to say an accused customer has no opportunity to respond to the accusations. In fact, each time an ISP reaches out to a customer, it is so the customer can dispute the accusation. An ISP customer presumably not hard to reach, as the ISP will have customer contact information (billing, perhaps?) and the customer has an incentive to be reached regarding security risks, etc. The customer will have wide latitude to justify the bandwidth usage that appears suspicious, and it is in the self-interest of the ISP to listen to the customer because they are not in the business of cutting off paying customers.
Let us also note that this process involves being approached not once, not twice, but for three instances of suspicion of mass infringement. What are the odds of a non-infringer being suspected of infringement three times and being unable to justify their suspicious broadband use three times? I think highly low indeed, but I trust that if that case should arise, the Electronic Frontier Foundation would be lightning quick to provide free legal counsel. In fact, they will be actively searching for just such an alleged victim.
Now Mr. Doctorow has turned his attention to a case in Ireland. The ISP issue, frankly, is more front-and-center in Europe right now because policymakers in various countries have been examining the possibility of mandating ISPs — with varying levels of emphasis — to cooperate with copyright owners on reducing infringement. In the free market that is the United States, the debate has rather been about voluntary cooperation. That is where we need to keep the debate, because a government mandate is another straw man in this country.
I have a great deal of respect for what Mr. Doctorow has accomplished as a writer. I am the son of an accomplished novelist but I have never had one published myself, so my hat is off to him. While his style of fiction is not my cup of tea, I know he has done well for himself, and has chosen to promote sharing of his work.
That said, Mr. Doctorow makes a choice regarding his copyright, namely, he chooses to forfeit some of them through a Creative Commons process. Note the word choice. Copyright means that a creator of works is not obligated to hand over his or her work to the masses on their terms. The creator may choose not to distribute it at all (rare for one that might have market appeal) or to distribute it more conventionally, i.e., without authorizing sharing. It is unfortunate when a creator who chooses to forfeit his rights expresses indignation at other creators who seek simply to ensure theirs are enforced.
January 30th, 2009 at 11:50 pm
He’s not expressing indignation at other creators - he’s expressing indignation at people being grossly overpunished because of a mere accusation with no proof being offered, which is happening time and time again.
January 31st, 2009 at 12:28 pm
http://torrentfreak.com/comcast-labels-innocent-customer-a-movie-pirate-090130/
These are the type of frequent problems people are facing that are relevant to this discussion.
February 2nd, 2009 at 4:20 pm
Oh boo hoo that a very few “innocent” people might be inconvenienced. At least you don’t have a financial blow dealt to you every time work is stolen. As a songwriter I have seen my income dwindle to almost nothing because PEOPLE ARE STEALING. Pure and simple. There needs to be more that can be done. These are people losing their livelihoods, not their internet access! People act like music, films etc just appear out of thin air. Someone should be getting paid to write and make all the stuff people are stealing! The real victims are creators, not consumers.
February 3rd, 2009 at 6:30 am
With a simple placement of quotation marks, Casey’s position is clear: No one is innocent.
I do agree with Casey in one regard: The creators are the victims. And as it relates to the original post by Mr. Ross: Creators who surrender their creation’s copyright are quite simply allowing themselves to be further victimized. The amount of money stolen from them is compounded by the fact that it is common practice for those who maintain copyrights “on behalf of the artist” license and collect quite quickly and thoroughly, but pay the artist insubstantially, if ever. Yet industry bigs would have you believe that they are the honest ones. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Additionally, it is on-line services, selling intellectual property without license who are socking to the creator, whether he owns his copyright or not. The amount of money and time and effort put into chasing file-sharers would appear misspent, if the creator knew just how much money was being made on his product that he is not aware of.
February 8th, 2009 at 6:38 am
I must preface this comment with a note: this is as much in response to the preceding respondents as to your post itself.
It does not make me happy to see anyone lose their job. I do not grin to see someone release works of art only to see low sales force them back into the rat race. One of my best friends wants to be a professional artist. Another wishes to be a professional writer, and I know many others.
Obviously, I have completely different views from you over the economic effect of copyright law as it currently stands, its effect on technological development and artistic creation, and whether it is even possible to enforce. I think you are very wrong. I also think you want the best for everyone.
I believe you (and several posters here) misunderstand Cory Doctorow’s reason for (as you call it, giving up some of his rights). He wishes us to, in a certain fashion, return to a rights paradigm which accommodates retelling in the fashion of ancient oral storytelling. There are obvious benefits, and obvious drawbacks - to several of my friends, “moral” rights over derivative content are extremely important. I don’t have a problem with an argument that the drawbacks outweigh the benefits, but from Cory’s point of view, he is relinquishing nothing that he had the right to in the first place. He sees himself as building a better world for creators and audiences alike, just as you see yourself as protecting the one that exists now.
I think that the works and arguments of Macaulay, Hayek, and similar great thinkers through the ages show quite vividly that copyright is given by government, not God, so to speak - it is man’s to give, not his to take away. Otherwise, its natural coverage would be unlimited and its term infinite, and you will not find that in laws modern or historical. Do not, then, harass Lessig for trying to implement his ideas - it does not make him a communist, though it may conceivably make him wrong and irresponsible.
February 9th, 2009 at 10:52 am
I can see where Mr. Doctorow feels he doesn’t have rights to surrender. That is his position. But that is not the position of current copyright law, and he can’t use his interpretation to infringe on the rights of others, or encourage infringement.
Note I wouldn’t say Mr. Doctorow does this. I think for the most part he encourages other creators to see copyright from his point of view and not seek to enforce rights he — according to your interpretation — does not find valid.
It is clear, however, that many who wish to infringe on others’ rights and are looking for a moral justification for this action take words by individuals such as Mr. Doctorow as a license for infringement. This is inarguable.
If Mr. Doctorow really feels his view of copyright is the correct one, he should engage in the policy debate and encourage a change in the law. That is something he has never done, as far as I know; in fact, EFF has an interesting history in which it officially chose not to engage in Washington. That is fine. But there are many rightsholders out there operating the way the current regime permits them, and I for one find it unfortunate that creators like Mr. Doctorow choose not to extend them the courtesy they deserve as fellow artists by not challenging their (legally correct) interpretation of copyright law.
February 15th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
I think we can both agree that Cory has little chance of changing the law as it stands now; he doesn’t have the necessary support from the public or the corporate world, let alone the political world. Given the vastly larger influence that (to give an example) the RIAA can exert on an issue, he is more likely to achieve tangible results by spreading his ideas and building a base of similar thinking persons. Putting restraints on copyright law can feel as herculean a task as stopping its infringement =)
We may have a different view on the responsibilities individuals hold regarding the control of their own speech. Should Doctorow try to restrain his own words out of respect for the rights he is trying to remove? I don’t think so, and here’s why.
I can fully understand why anti-copyright arguments would seem self-centered and self-serving. However, they appeal naturally to many of us who have known digital networks for most of our lives, regardless of any personal benefit involved. I would suggest that a large percent of Doctorow’s fans believe in the superiority of relaxed copyright law from a rights-based or utilitarian perspective rather than an egoist one. He is making arguments toward these, and his main intention is not to spread the idea of (ahem) “civil disobedience” among the rest, to use a polite phrasing.
But what about those scoundrels who just want free stuff and find his ideas temporarily useful? I do not think the culture of piracy has a strong need for philosophical arguments in order to spread itself, or that Doctorow is having a significant positive effect on infringement. In the long run he wants to change the system to make those activities legal, but that’s rather the point. There are also those who caught with their hands stuck in cookie jars who look to pull his ideas out at the last moment as some haphazard defense, but for all of that they are no less doomed. Given these points, I would suggest that Doctorow is likely to do no great harm to copyright owners unless he is ultimately successful in winning the ideological war in the public’s mind (by which time he would be much more directly involved with the law).