Category: DRM and IPR

My wife and I have been married nearly 24 years; a long time ago, when she was pregnant with our first child, I remember her saying “You know something? It’s amazing just how often you notice pregnant women just because you’re thinking about pregnancy”. I’m sure psychologists have a term for the condition, some sort of bias I guess.

That’s the way I feel about copyrights and trade marks right now, in fact that’s the way I feel about intellectual property rights in general. Somehow I’ve become sensitised to noticing stories that have something to do with copyright, ever since my blood began to simmer while reading the nonsensical arguments related to the Harry Potter lexicon lawsuit.

I was on the plane to Shanghai, doing my usual read-and-tear-out rituals with the analog press, and I noticed this story, in the Independent on Sunday, about Len Deighton and the Fleming family. Until I read the article, I had no idea that James Bond films were a completely “separate enterprise to the novels, and Ian Fleming Publications, run by the surviving members of Fleming’s family, has no control over or copyright of the movies.”. Now I’m not entirely sure how accurate that statement is. If there was anyone other than Fleming I would associate with the James Bond films, it’s Cubby Broccoli, and usually Harry Saltzman as well. It appears to me that the guys at the Independent got it wrong: while McClory and Whittingham won the right to share screenplay credits for Thunderball as a result of their lawsuit, that has very little to do with the separation between Bond novels and Bond films. That happened ostensibly because Fleming placed all his book rights in Glidrose/Ian Fleming Publications as early as 1952, and sold all his film rights to Saltzman and Broccoli.

The article itself wasn’t really about this: it was about the apparent heavy-handed (and ultimately successful) attempts by the Fleming family to censor a book called The Battle For Bond. Ironically, it is now due for release at around the same time as Devil May Care, the Sebastian Faulks addition to the Bond stable.

While I was musing about this, wondering about a world where we have such strange copyright arguments, I carried on with my analog read-and-tear sessions. Soon I was ensconced in the New Statesman: my eye was drawn to an article by Becky Hogge, whose blog, machine envy, I read reasonably often; she’s been quiet-ish of late.

This time around it was the now-famous story of Mazz, the knitting blogger who published patterns for Adiposes and Oods on her web site. [Note: If you ever wondered what happened to the byproducts of liposuction, now you know. I guess you wish you’d never asked…].

Mazz, a self-confessed Dr Who fan, designed the patterns herself, and published them for all to use. But she hadn’t allowed for the BBC Worldwide Brand Protection Team, who were on to her immediately. She was politely asked to remove the patterns, which she did. Her case has now been taken up by the Open Rights Group, where Hogge is now the Executive Director.

She makes a fundamental point:

If Mazz’s case were to go to court, the BBC would stand an excellent chance of winning, and Mazz could be bankrupted. Because the law at present makes no distinction between Mazz and somone selling fake Louis Vuitton handbags on a street corner.

I am generally not in favour of any law or regulation which starts from a premise that everyone’s guilty; sadly, much that I see in today’s Intellectual Property regime (I hesitate to call them rights; regime sounds more plausible) looks that way to me. An assumption of guilt that makes laws unworkable.

That’s what I was thinking about when I saw this story: song lyrics from Amy Winehouse included in a third-year Cambridge University English Literature paper on practical criticism; her lyrics were alongside the works of Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth. Why ever not? [I remember how chuffed I was at being allowed to read Cat Stevens‘ Father and Son as my Elocution exam “poem” in 1971.]

The article also makes references to Bob Dylan and Billie Holliday in the same paper, and to the Bee Gees in an earlier one.

So. I guess we can all look forward to Cliff (of Cliff’s Notes fame, whoever he may be) being sued for copyright; or maybe the person to be sued is the person who sat next to you in class, laboriously writing out sections of prose and lyric as preparation for her exams. [Is there a statute of limitations for copyright breaches?]

This stuff is broken. And it needs to be fixed. Fixed in a way that doesn’t treat every one of us as criminals. Am I right in thinking that in the UK, people who pay for a CD and then import it into iTunes are technically committing a crime? But don’t despair too much, at least every one of the articles I referenced in this post was not hidden behind a paywall, something that just wouldn’t have happened a few years ago.

The Times, They are A-Changing.

I’ve kept an eye on the J.K.Rowling lexicon lawsuit for some time now. Initially I thought it was an April Fool’s joke. Then, as I realised it was serious, I thought it best to park it at the back of my mind, I had more important things to do. I guess I considered the lawsuit frivolous.

But it set me thinking. I remember having a similar reaction when I first heard of the concept of “image rights” a decade or two ago. Surely some things are in the commons, surely some things are well within a fair use definition. It is one thing for a celebrity to negotiate payment for the right to publish photographs taken in an exclusive closed-doors invite-only event (as celebrities are wont to do with weddings). It is another thing altogether to assert rights when photographed walking in the street.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, lexicons and dictionaries and indices all fall into my concept of fair use. If I take the Rowling thinking to an extreme, what is Technorati? In fact what is Google?

I’m no expert on copyright, I’m no expert on intellectual property rights. But events like the Rowling lawsuit help me realise that there’s a lot of work to be done in improving the current state of these rights.

Incidentally, I found it enjoyable to read Neil Gaiman on this subject here and here and here. He makes the transformational copyright argument really well, particularly with the example of the Abi Sutherland poem. He also lays out the derivative works arguments in ways that can mean something to laymen. What is equally fascinating is the comment thread for these posts. If you’re interested, do take a read.

Artificial abundances.

I’d spent quite some time thinking about artificial scarcities, but never really considered the possibility of abundances being artificial as well.

That’s the problem with being on holiday, your mind goes off in all kinds of tangents. This post is actually the result of my reading the following article in today’s FT: US steps up piracy battle. [Intriguingly, when I went to look for the article via Google, I found a number of articles with the identical headline, all in the past three weeks or so].

The more I think about it, the more I realise it’s time we had a First Law of Scarcity and Abundance:

If you create an artificial scarcity, then be prepared for someone else to create an artificial abundance

A hundred years ago, it might have been reasonable for someone in Hollywood to plot the release of a film in time-slices across geographical areas. Even fifty years ago it might have been reasonable. I’m no expert; but if I were to guess at the reasons why a Hollywood studio would want to release the same film at different times in different locations, I’d come up with economic ones. Like producing a finite number of copies of the original master, and then releasing them one market at a time, reusing the same copies.

The trouble is, somebody went and built a whole distribution model on the past practice, and now it’s being imposed on a digital environment where it’s completely unnecessary.

Digital “content” has zero transmission and reproduction cost. Any attempt to control the release of digital content, across geographical areas, at different times, is tantamount to creating artificial scarcity. And when this happens, people will find ways of getting around the artificial scarcity, creating an artificial abundance.

That’s why people unlock locked phones.

That’s why Region Coding on DVDs was such an appalling idea.

If Hollywood is now only considering reducing the time-lapse between geographical releases, it is missing the point. Zero time lapse leads to zero piracy.

Something to think about

 

Remember Fake Steve? If you haven’t read his blog, it’s an absolute must. Sadly, it looks like he’s finally been outed. Hope he carries on regardless.

Makes you think that MSM has a chance of survival after all. Which is what I was thinking when I saw this article in Information Week. Cory Doctorow on How DRM becomes law. I wasn’t surprised that the article was written by Cory, he is his usual excellent and articulate self. What surprised me was that Information Week carried it. Not a place I would normally expect to see such stuff. How things change.

And talking about DRM, there’s a quiet little site called Life’s Not Read Only which is worth a look. Particularly the recent July update. Whoever Olivier is, I like the way he thinks. I may not agree with everything he says, but I do like the way he thinks.

My partially-self-imposed silence has meant that I’ve got a long list of things I’ve wanted to blog about, a state that Sean has often claimed he’s in.  And one of the things I wanted to bring to your attention was Cory Doctorow’s 30 minute session being an Author@Google.  Here’s the link; I’ve also put it into my VodPod to make it easier.

He makes a beautiful argument for the Because Effect inherent in the Web, and for the way this generates wealth; somewhere along the line he shows just how Luddite we are becoming as a result of poorly thought out DRM (and similarly poorly-thought-out IPR in general); he takes us on an almost-tangential journey through some of the implications from the viewpoint of world trade and economic development; and he does all this with his trade-mark wry sense of humour (what did our futurists come up with? Not Google. Not even Expedia. But eBooks….).

The Luddism argument is particularly strong, something I’m sure many of you have considered before, something I know I have considered before. What Cory does is bring his storyteller strengths into the exposition of the argument. Delightful.

I’ve known Cory for a while now, not particularly well but well enough to know that we share common viewpoints on many things. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend you do, just to understand the kind of damage that can be wrought by bad DRM, and just how unnecessary and avoidable this is.

My thanks to Cory for a very entertaining half-hour. (Nb: The clip is actually an hour long when you take in the Q&A session at the end, where for some reason the sound quality dips).