Copyfraud Is Stealing the Public Domain 263
malkavian writes "This community has complained long and loudly about the very one-sided approach to copyright, and the not-so-slow erosion of the public domain. On top of the corporate lobbying to remove increasingly larger parts of the public domain, there is now an growing pattern whereby works are directly taken from the public domain and effectively stolen by a single company leveraging protections provided under copyright law. The Register's article is based on a paper by Jason Mazzone at the Brooklyn Law School, which starkly details the problems that are now becoming evident as entities grab control over public domain works. The paper proposes some possible solutions, such as amending the Copyright Act. From the abstract: 'Copyright law itself creates strong incentives for copyfraud. The Copyright Act provides for no civil penalty for falsely claiming ownership of public domain materials. There is also no remedy under the Act for individuals who wrongly refrain from legal copying or who make payment for permission to copy something they are in fact entitled to use for free. While falsely claiming copyright is technically a criminal offense under the Act, prosecutions are extremely rare. These circumstances have produced fraud on an untold scale, with millions of works in the public domain deemed copyrighted, and countless dollars paid out every year in licensing fees to make copies that could be made for free.'"
Re:Combating Cyberfraud (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Combating Cyberfraud (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hypocrites (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Hypocrites (Score:1, Informative)
Straw man arguments are lies.
Re:I'm glad someone's pointing out this fraud (Score:5, Informative)
The paper was written in 1869.
And when was the editing and typesetting for the edition you used done? Do you know that there area lot of public domain music works but very few recorded performances that are in the public domain?
Publishers like Kessinger Publishing [kessinger.net] specialized in maintaing and providing a means for acquiring out of print public works. They served a very valuable purpose at one point but the internet, Project Gutenberg, even Google should make them obsolete soon. We're in a transition period.
The issue with the Google books is that they don't have the original 1800s printing of the first volume. That's why they had to rely on Kessinger. Kessinger publishes both volumes of Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan and the second original printing is free on Google books. Google faces the problem of not being able to re-edit or do its own typesetting of the first edition so instead of risking litigation they just put up what they can. They cannot fight these fights for every book. I think the copyfraud label applied to them is misplaced and will soon be a non-issue as others step forward with their personal collections to offer up to the internet.
Re:Broken Windows (Score:1, Informative)
"Countless dollars paid out every year in licensing fees to make copies that could be made for free" sounds like it's good for the economy.
However, the Parable of the Broken Window [wikipedia.org] would suggest otherwise.
That's because the parable of the broken window is wrong; that's why it's also referred to as the broken window fallacy.
Economies improve when consumers are free to spend on whatever they want, so producers are forced to compete. If the hands of consumers are tied and spending on particular products is forced, producers do not have to compete because they are guaranteed an income, they become lazy and stagnate. No new value is created.
Been there, done that (Score:3, Informative)
I have a number of reprints of old books, like The Western Avernus, memoirs of a construction worker on the Canadian Pacific Railway. It was published in 1887, and the copyright has long since expired. The reprint, from 2005, claims copyright, even though the original author (long since dead) had nothing to do with it, nor, as far as I can tell, did his estate or descendants.
What, exactly, are Cosimo Classics copyrighting?
...laura
Confused about Creative Commons? (Score:1, Informative)
I'll ignore the overheated rhetoric about "copyfraud". I agree that claiming copyright where you do not have a claim is pernicious behavior. But I think the author goes a little far talking about people *deserving* free access to material. Everything costs something, even public domain material needs to be printed or otherwise transmitted. That costs something no matter how small. Sure, maybe it is subsidized (e.g. public libraries) or maybe your sugar daddy (university) pays for your access, but the cost is still there.
Other than that quibble, the author also seems to be confused about Creative Commons licensing. For instance:
"Creative Commons seeks to become the arbiter of public domain licensing, yet it has no governmental authority and cannot enforce its licenses. Nor is it subject to Congressional oversight like the Copyright Office."
That makes absolutely no sense. Creative Commons provides licenses that authors and creators can apply to their work, but the Creative Commons doesn't *claim* any authorship on the works that use the licenses. That would be like claiming that because you use the GPL or MIT license that the FSF or MIT now somehow has copyright claims to your works. That is simply not the case.
Furthermore, the Creative Commons public domain license is meant to provide a means to put something into the public domain while it would normally still be under copyright. Since everything published now defaults to copyright status, this license is an attempt to place something in the public domain if you don't want to wait multiple lifetimes (or perhaps much, much longer) for it to happen under current law. (Truthfully, there appears to be some debate as to whether it is even possible to place something into the public domain under US copyright law, but that's a whole other discussion.) That license is *not* meant to somehow claim authority and license existing works already in the public domain.
Re:I'm glad someone's pointing out this fraud (Score:1, Informative)
"And when was the editing and typesetting for the edition you used done?"
1869.
It was a copy of the original. The copyright had expired. There was no ambiguity unless you're suggesting the librarian that slapped the journal volume onto the photocopier was making a new work with it's own copyright.
I also contemplated the possibility that the boilerplate interlibrary loan sheet stapled to the front was the copyrighted part, and that I'd have to pay a fee if I wanted to copy that page, but that seemed silly :-)
In any case, were I to scan in this 1869 work and make it available on the web I hope that I or anyone else wouldn't be able to correctly assert copyright over it. Expiry should be final unless, as you say, you've completely re-typeset the thing.
therefore the GPL (Score:5, Informative)
Some of this has been solved through copyright changes. Now everything is automatically copyrighted and if one can prove providence, then one can stop the theft of intellectual property. If one has the money. This still does not necessarily eliminate the threat from derivative works, which explains the GPL viral nature. Not only is this work GPL and in the public domain, but anything derived from it. This is only way to insure that the authors original intent, to have product in the public domain, is heeded. One might complain that the at some point the authors wishes should not be in play, and the work should enter the more general lawless public domain. Such issues though are not unique to the GPL. Such issues are governed by more general rules such as the leagth of copyright(essentially forever) and the applicability of the EULA. If the length of copyright were at most the lifetime of the author, and EULA were not allowed to excessively restrict free use by the user, for instant to disallow first sale doctrine and fair use, then these would not be an issue for the GPL either.
But they are issues, and the GPL does appear to provide a good protection against theft from the public domain, which is why those that make a living stealing [corante.com] from [theregister.co.uk] the public good are so against it. Of course they are. These companies seldom give anything back , at least not without a huge price tag. The one time that Bill Gates accidently gave something away, . Of course now an occasional tuppence are given to select beneficiaries to cloud the guilt, but there you are. he GPL is evil because it prevents thefts and insure the public domain. Which is, apparently, a very bad thing to do.
Re:I'm glad someone's pointing out this fraud (Score:5, Informative)
I requested a paper via interlibrary loan, and attached was the standard boilerplate that it is copyrighted work, a licensing fee had been paid for the copy to be used only for the purposes of scholarly research, additional copies were $1.25 each to be paid to XXXXXX, ... blah, blah blah. The paper was written in 1869.
This is a good example of one type of sneaky wording that is probably technically true, but means something very different from what most people think it means. The claimed copyright is probably valid, but it applies to that printed edition of the work. The words themselves aren't copyrightable, but you can still get a copyright on a specific printed form of the work. But note that the publisher didn't say this; they used the common technique of just saying "copyright" or used the standard circled 'c' copyright symbol, and didn't quite say what was copyrighted. (If you misunderstood what they were claiming copyright to, well, it's not their problem that you are so ignorant of copyright law. ;-)
They probably can legally charge a price for a printed copy of their specific printed edition of the work. But if you were to type the words into your computer and put them online, they'd probably be careful when making a copyright claim, because claiming that they own the words would be fraud. This is how sites like Project Gutenberg work; they ask people to type up the text of works that are out of copyright, and they put the words online formatted differently from any printed version. That way, they aren't violating the copyright on any printed edition.
I've seen a bit of this from working with a group that's putting a lot of music online in a compact computerized data format. There are several formats competing now, with ABC in the lead, and formats like LilyPond, RoseGarden, and Music[X]ML with active development of interesting software. Most of the online music is old, 1800s or earlier, in great part due to copyright considerations. Still, I've read of a number of cases where some publisher sends a nasty C&D letter to someone with such music on their site. The site's owner talks a bit on some forums, then sends a reply of the form "That music was published by So-and-So in London in 1723. My file is not a scan of your publication or any other publication. How are you claiming ownership of the music?" The publisher understands that they've been caught in an attempt at consumer fraud, and so far they have always slunk away and aren't heard from again. Until we read in some forum that another user of the software has received a nasty C&D message.
Actually, sometimes it works differently. My web site has copies of the transcription of the three O'Neill's volumes (that every traditional Irish musician will know). The transcribing was done by a small team of musicians. I did a search for current printed editions, found that Mel Bay makes some very good ones (that open flat on a music stand). So I put links to melbay.com in my pages describing the collection, recommending these editions to anyone who would like a good printed copy. A few months later, I got a nice message from a Mel Bay employee, thanking me for referring people to them. There was no hint that they were unhappy with our online "edition". Someone there understood that my site was good advertising for them. Their editions of such old music also contain copyright notices at the beginning that says fairly clearly that it's their printed edition that is covered. The actual pages of music often don't even contain copyright notices, apparently because they often use copies of the original printing plates, which are out of copyright now (and hidden away in a library somewhere).
So some publishers are trying to do such things right. We should encourage them.
(I also like to use such things in discussions of how threatened publishers are by online editions. Printed editions of music that's available online are often selling pretty well. T
Re:Capitalism at it's finest (Score:5, Informative)
Wonderful comment. You'll get your +5 mod anyway, so I'd rather comment on your last "option":
3. Ignore it completely. Go about your business. Encourage your friends to do the same. Ignore law enforcement demands, company demands, government demands. They're idiots, you're enlightened, Watch it become a "War on Drugs" and our country become irrelevant in the world economics as it tears itself apart trying to enforce a hopelessly doomed social constraint mechanism. If we cannot succeed domestically, we'll wait until we, as a culture, simply die out from international pressure. *shrug* It's not the most patriotic solution, but it's practical.
Unfortunately that's not the way it goes. There's no you, and us, and patriotism anymore. It's them benefiting from endless copyright vs. us humankind that would benefit from knowledge in the public domain. If the status-quo changes they'll lose their 3rd yacht, and their army of lawyers will need professional reorientation. They have everything to lose and they won't give up easily.
The RIAA and MPAA might be U.S.-based, but they're everywhere; they just go by different names. Haven't you noticed Swedish online service providers being held liable for $3.5 million for copyright violations that never happened? Or the 3-strikes law that was passed by the French legislative body, and they were barely saved by their constitutional court? Or the traffic filtering efforts in the U.K.?
Expect the Author's Guild to follow suit once they figure out how to do it internationally. We have yet to find out what ACTA brings upon us.
So it's not just about your culture, but our culture. If you're waiting for international pressure, sorry to disappoint you: they got to us too. And I somehow doubt the blatant copyright violators like China and revolution-torn Iran will fill that role.
Re:Been there, done that (Score:4, Informative)
I have a number of reprints of old books, ... The reprint, from 2005, claims copyright, even though the original author (long since dead) had nothing to do with it, nor, as far as I can tell, did his estate or descendants.
What, exactly, are Cosimo Classics copyrighting?
Their claiming copyright on their specific printed edition of the work. Even if the text is public domain, that printed version can still be covered by copyright. So if you run it through a copier and sell the copy, you'll be violating their copyright. But if you type the text into your computer and put it online (perhaps at Gutenberg.org), you won't be making a copy of their printed edition, only of the words that it contains, and you'll be legal. It'll help if you make the line breaks different, so it's obviously not a copy. Or even better, use HTML so it'll look nice on everyone's screen.
Re:It's *Fraud* (Score:4, Informative)
The copyright act actually DOES provide penalties for falsely attaching a copyright notice. But they are _criminal_ penalties -- 17 USC 506 (c) provides for a $2500 fine for anyone who does so. But there's no private right of action and good luck actually getting a prosecutor involved.
Re:Combating Cyberfraud (Score:2, Informative)
Congratulations; you've discovered Project Gutenberg.
Technically, you are only bound by Gutenberg's license terms if you leave the license in place. According to their page on licensing, specifically on Public Domain works, it says,--
A Project Gutenberg ebook is made out of two parts: the public domain book and the non public domain Project Gutenberg trademark and license. If you strip the Project Gutenberg license and all references to Project Gutenberg from the ebook, you are left with a public domain ebook. You can do anything you want with that.
So, where exactly does Project Gutenberg come into this "stealing the public domain" thing? No modification to the work has been made save to prefix it with a trademark and license--and without internal changes to the document no further copyright is granted. For the full legalese please see section 1.E of the license. [gutenberg.org]
Re:Combating Cyberfraud (Score:4, Informative)
Australia, which has much looser copyrights
Careful. Australia follows Life+50 which is different from the US rules, but is not strictly looser. There are items that are PD in the US that are NOT PD in Australia and vice versa. The real difference is the Life+ time limit being so long in the US that the only things currently in PD are PD due to the old published prior to 1923 rules. But there are pre 1923 items whose authors don't meet the Life+50 test. Lots of them.
Re:I'm glad someone's pointing out this fraud (Score:3, Informative)
O'neills - online? oooh... (Am a fiddle-player).
Yeah, me, too, plus accordion and whistle. And you're a bit behind the times. The O'Neill's Project was, as far as I can tell, the first attempt like this to put such a historical tune collection online. It was started by Dan Bornbeim in 1997, and with the help of about two dozen people, was finished in early 1999. So it took you a decade to find it. ;-)
Since then, a lot of other similar projects have been organized, to transcribe other historic music collections and put them online. Most of them have been mirrored at several sites, for all the obvious reasons. I organized the project to put the Ryan/Cole collection online, and with the help of about a half dozen others, it was finished (I think ;-) a couple of years ago. Others have transcribed other collections, and I have mirrors of a lot of them, as do others. There seems to be a big project underway in Sweden now to put all of Svenska Laatar online. A couple of years ago, hardly any of its tunes were online; now there are several thousand. There are about 8,000 tunes in that collection, so it'll be a few more years before they're done. Some of the world's best fiddle tunes are in that collection.
But to get more on-topic, these projects have all had similar discussions of copyright issues. The consensus seems to be that there haven't been any real problems so far with putting older music online, especially in a computer notation like ABC or LilyPond. The few problems that have popped up mostly seem to be what some poster here called "copyfraud", which is a good portmanteau term for the topic we're discussing. Publishers like to claim ownership of music by merely reprinting it and maybe doing a bit of editing to convert it to modern notation standards. But this hasn't worked out so well for them, because there are a lot of us willing to do the historical research. And see the Fiddler's Companion [ibiblio.org] site for a good source of the historical data.
Meanwhile, a few publishers have cooperated, and when we reciprocate by referencing their published versions in our files, it makes everyone happy. After all, well-done music books (with a binding that lies open on a music stand) has many advantages over a computer screen. The screen is OK for small works of a few pages. But for a collection like Ryan's Mammoth Collection, most musicians who play that sort of music will want a good hard-copy version. You can download all the online tunes from any of the mirrors, convert them to PS or PDF, feed them to your printer, and put them in a binder. Or you can pay Mel Bay $22.95 (plus shipping) for a nicely-done wire-bound copy with several pages of historical notes, and spend the saved time playing music. That's an easy decision for an Irish-music addict.
Actually, it's unfortunate that they don't yet have O'Neill's three books in wire-bound editions. Maybe in a few more years.
Re:Combating Cyberfraud (Score:1, Informative)
(I'm replying to your post to keep this near the parent. Anonymously, just in case there is something wrong with posting this.)
Here is the whois information:
Registrant:
Kessinger Publishing, LLC
PO Box 1404
Whitefish, MT 59937
US
Domain Name: KESSINGER.NET
Administrative Contact:
Kessinger, Roger books@KESSINGERPUB.COM
Kessinger Publishing
PO Box 160
Kila, MT 59920
US
(406) 756-0167 fax: 999 999 9999
Technical Contact:
Hostmaster, d.f hostmaster@forest.net
digital.forest, Inc.
12101 Tukwila Intl Blvd
Suite 410
Seattle, WA 98168
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206-838-1630 fax: 206-838-3749
Record expires on 03-Nov-2018.
Record created on 03-Nov-1999.
Database last updated on 26-Jun-2009 16:59:01 EDT.
Domain servers in listed order:
NS41.WORLDNIC.COM 205.178.190.21
NS42.WORLDNIC.COM 205.178.144.21
Canada, sir! Canada! (Score:3, Informative)
Ah, but Australia has seen a cease in the extension of its public domain; the clock is stopped at 1955 [wikipedia.org] for the next decade and change. As a result, we have Project Gutenberg Canada [gutenberg.ca], and its associated Distributed Proofreaders Canada [pgdpcanada.net]. Anyone who died in 1938 or earlier is eligible for inclusion there, and they'll be celebrating Public Domain Day every January 1 for the foreseeable future--hopefully, it's much harder now to pass a damned extension than it was a decade ago.
Re:Keen (Score:3, Informative)
Nope. These ideas existed before. This presentation of these ideas did not.
First, the normal terms of art are ideas and expressions. The famous idea/expression dichotomy is that ideas are not copyrightable, but expressions of those ideas may be. The seminal case on the issue dealt with a book about a system of accounting. The precise language used to describe the system could be copyrightable, but the system itself which was being described was not copyrightable. Anyone was free to learn the system and describe it in full in their own words and not risk infringement. Learning the system from the first book was a perfectly acceptable method of doing so.
Second, we're not just talking about ideas. Ideas are generally treated as being pretty simplistic, e.g. the idea of an archaeologist-adventurer is central to the Indiana Jones stories, but it also works for Tomb Raider, Stargate, etc. It is safe to watch one of these and copy that idea when creating your own work. The dividing line between ideas and expressions is a bit fuzzy, particularly since the courts don't want to require precise copying of an expression, and thus leave authors vulnerable to people who copy everything with only one slight difference. But there's usually numerous ideas in a work (Nazis are bad, ancient artifacts have real powers, ruins are always protected by surprisingly complicated and functional booby traps, etc.), and some very basic plots could be considered ideas (e.g. a race to find some ancient doohickey).
Anyway, though, since we're talking about a derivative work, the realm of what is not protected is actually quite a lot larger than usual. Not only are ideas uncopyrightable as always, but when you create a derivative work, the copyright on the work only applies to the new material added. It does not cover the pre-existing material the derivative work is based upon. Nor does the copyright on the new material add or extend protection to the pre-existing material. This is more the issue in the example of Snow White.
The basic Snow White story is that there's a princess, Snow White, who is beautiful, and there's an evil stepmother who finds out via magic mirror that S.W. is more beautiful than she, arranges S.W.'s death, but S.W. doesn't die and instead shacks up with dwarves, so the stepmother disguises herself, gives S.W. a poison apple, and this causes S.W. to fall asleep until awoken by a prince, happily ever after, the end. Disney did not create this. They have no right to it whatsoever. The fact that they built a whole movie around it, much of which is copyrightable, does not somehow make the underlying story that they copied from somewhere else copyrightable. Since their copyright only applies to material they added, anyone who only knows the Snow White story from the Disney movie can copy the uncopyrightable stuff directly from the movie and use it as will, and be entirely on the right side of the law.
If you read this presentation and derive your work from it then you are "copying". ... Their original elements will be assumed to be copied unless you can demonstrate they were not. Their traditional elements will be assumed not to have been copied - but may be shown still to have been copied if you include their typo's and such; it is the copying that is protected. The clue is in the name.
In fact, you're wrong. Copyright only prohibits the copying of copyrighted material. Not copying period. The Snow White story is not copyrighted, thus it may be copied freely, from wheresoever it is found. Only original material based upon that story, such as the visual appearance of the character in the cartoon, is copyrightable, and thus not legal to copy.
Also, as the plaintiff in an infringement suit, Disney would bear the burden of proving that the defendant copied material which Disney had a copyright on; the mere fact of copying isn't sufficient for them to win an infringement case. As for the uncopyrighted material, no one will care where it came from, and the questi