Copyfraud Is Stealing the Public Domain 263
Posted
by
kdawson
from the uncivil-actions dept.
from the uncivil-actions dept.
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.'"
Keen (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Combating Cyberfraud (Score:5, Insightful)
So people should do that with these "stolen" works: scan them in and submit them to Project Gutenberg. I'd be very interested in what the copyright claimer would do about that.
(But my fear is that it's going to be determined by who can afford the most lawyers.)
Re:Combating Cyberfraud (Score:3, Insightful)
The big problem is that's exactly the repository the CopyFraud groups use to obtain the Public Domain material to slap their Copyright on, and "own" the material through Google etc. until someone puts up a legal suit to remove it as copyright material. There's no incentive NOT to falsely claim copyright of public domain material. That's the issue from the articles.
It's *Fraud* (Score:5, Insightful)
> 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.
This is because it isn't under the Act at all, nor should it be. It is ordinary fraud and should be prosecuted as such. The fact that the Act provides no penalties for it does not mean that nothing can be done.
Capitalism at it's finest (Score:5, Insightful)
Capitalism doesn't recognize anything that cannot be monetized. And capitalism is also averse to anything being public -- the argument being the tragedy of the commons, which is this: For any shared responsibility, the more people sharing that responsibility, the less responsible each person will be, until everyone is effectively irresponsible, thus the public utility becomes useless/abused/less valuable.
Capitalism is a fine concept for tangible items. But it's not very good at all for intangibles. Nonetheless, as we moved from a production-based economy to a service-based one, these intangibles had to be protected by businesses somehow, so as to ensure their continued relevance and profitability. The hasty modifications to trade secret, copyright, and patent law, was a poor attempt to bridge this gap, and there was little or no public input. Simply put, society didn't have the time or attention devoted to addressing the changing landscape, because most of us at that time either weren't educated about it, or struggling to put food on the table and change careers to adapt to the changing economy. We were so focused on the immediate result that we all but ignored future consequences.
Using bait terms won't solve the problem. "Copyfraud" sounds great, but it's meaningless. It's the same with a lot of other terms -- "Net neutrality" comes to mind -- to the uninformed, it sounds good but isn't very descriptive. "Copy fraud" could mean "copying as a means of fraud" -- which is exactly what many businesses are calling the free sharing of digitized information.
We have three options here, which are not mutually exclusive:
1. Vote with your dollars. Don't buy products that have an effective cost of zero to own. Put another way - stop buying anything in a purely digital format. Instead, only buy periphery products -- such as warranties, service level agreements, support, or mp3 players, televisions, etc. This will eventually starve out business models that depend on selling products that should be free, and allow business models that support this paradigm shift to free information to flourish.
2. Stay in the system. Buy out public product and design licensing that ensures they remain public, and then put those rights in a shell corporate. GNU comes to mind, with their GPL licensing, and the many derivatives thereof. By gaming the system in this fashion, GNU is ensuring that copyright enforcement actions will always be in their favor. Over a long enough time frame, they will win the "war", because companies that cannot provide alternatives to public-domain product will go out of business. Ironically, it's one of the best arguments for innovation out there. The only catch is--Placing something in the public domain or having it remain there still has a monentary cost, however low. So far, the community hasn't addressed this systemically.
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.
Money (Score:5, Insightful)
Our copyright laws are focused on making money for companies. They should be focused on making works as available as possible while still encouraging the creation of new works.
It's one of the clearest examples of how our government has been sold and does not exist primarily for the people.
Re:I'm glad someone's pointing out this fraud (Score:4, Insightful)
This is not new; it's why I started using the GPL about 15 years ago rather than releasing stuff as public domain, because I read of this very problem somewhere.
There's a name for it (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
This statement is an example of the same sort of "logic" used by the public-domain squatters: It's technically true, but very misleading. It doesn't matter if the Copyright Act doesn't provide penalties; there are plenty of other laws that apply. One thing these companies are guilty of is commonly called "consumer fraud", and large penalties can apply in such cases.
The real problem is the lack of prosecution, mostly because it typically takes a class-action lawsuit to get enough money behind it to challenge a company's legal budget. Local DAs tend to take a "not my job" attitude to such things, so it requires organized community action to fight such fraud.
Maybe what we should be doing is documenting cases of such fraud, and publicizing them when the topic comes up in forums like this one.
Anyone want to post a list of some of their favorite fraudulent claims of ownership of public-domain material?
Disney does it with fairy tales (Score:5, Insightful)
from children's stories and then they make their own copyrighted version of it.
Snow White
Alice in Wonderland
Peter Pan
Sleeping Beauty
Beauty and the Beast
The Little Mermaid
The Lion King
The Jungle Book
Etc.
The copyright from such fair tales and children's stories have expired and they got released to the public domain. Then Disney takes them and rewrites them slightly to have a Disney twist. Then Disney copyrights them.
I see no issue here. (Score:5, Insightful)
I can bottle rain water and sell it to stupid people. I can take communication bandwidth which costs me nothing extra and charge people every time they send a single text message over it. I can make something people can make themselves and charge 10 times the value of the components. I can send spam to millions of people and let them send me money. If people don't take the time to evaluate their purchases, capitalism dies. We should be encouraging people not to buy junk that falls apart, so the companies go out of business. If they pay for Linux but can get it for free, should Red Hat go out of business?
I know, Red Hat is only putting a copyright on their additions, but how do we make this distinction clear from whatever else this whining is about?
Someone who takes an out of copyright text and prints it has provided a service and deserves to be paid for it. If they make any additions to the text, such as editorializing or checking or whatever, the updates are now copyright of the people who printed it. I can take an original Beethoven score and reproduce it, but if I take an editorialized edition produced 10 years ago, I can't distribute that for free because of the value added by the publisher. In most cases, origianl scores are written in old-style notation and must be updated to make sense to today's musicians, and that conversion is a new, protected work.
So the real complaint is the narrow bunch of stuff which is being reproduced, verbatim, with a copyright attached. And the real concern isn't even that businesses are making money - it's simply that copyright is being asserted. Yes?
My understanding is that even if you take something in the public domain, your arrangement of it can be copyrighted.
For example, a phone book. The data itself cannot be copyrighted. The presentation can. If you stick it in a photocopier and sell the copies, that's a problem. They give the phone book away, so giving away a copy is technically illegal but probably won't be enforced. If you re-type everything and get the company logos from the companies and effectively reproduce it so it looks nearly enough the same, you could get sued for copying the presentation - not the contents.
In this case of Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan, where the book is essentially scans of another book, there are parts of the book which are copyrighted. The cover is, any forward or editorial material is, notes included. Anything that was added is copyrighted, and copyright law has only one way of distinguishing that. You put the copyright notice on it like you do anything else. Would you rather make an author call out which parts of the book are covered and are not? On every page?
Put another way, a derivative work of something in copyright is not allowed. A derivative work of something out of copyright is essentially a new work. You can still go back to the source and copy it for free - that hasn't been changed.
So the complaint is really just about the fact that people *might not* understand how copyright law works, and *might* pay money to a company that makes it easily accessible instead of rummaging around trying to find the original. I see no problem here. People need to know how laws work in order to live other parts of their lives, so let's just consider this a place where people need to understand exactly what copyright means.
Re:Keen (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Is Slashdot for or against copyright today? (Score:3, Insightful)
Copyright itself is theft of the public domain (Score:3, Insightful)
If I own some raw material and craft an object out of it, I own that object. I own it not because I created the object, but because I owned the raw material it was made from. If someone else takes some of my raw material without my permission and crafts an object, I still own the resulting object, for the same reason: the act of creation using my material doesn't change ownership.
If we accept the premise that intellectual works are property like any other, then we must recognize that virtually all works are made primarily of intellectual property owned by the public ("public domain"), and are thus still owned by the public. To claim ownership, as opposed to mere authorship, is outright fraud.
Happy Birthday to You!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday_to_You [wikipedia.org]
This is copyright fraud, but it's so small that noone will take the time and money to the courts to fix it.
Re:Is Slashdot for or against copyright today? (Score:4, Insightful)
I believe an insistence that copyright be respected for GPL licenced software sits perfectly well with a desire for a more balanced copyright regime - one with much shorter copyright durations, and where people are free to exercise their fair-use rights without being criminalised by the DMCA.
Re:Copyright itself is theft of the public domain (Score:4, Insightful)
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
Under the "Powers of Congress" section. The key here is "limited Times"
Lawrence Lessig took a case all the way to the Supreme Court, Eldred v. Ashcroft, but the court decided that 70 + lifetime with infinite extensions was "Limited", even though the founding fathers thought 14 years was limited.
Things move faster now than in colonial times. Copyright and Patents shouldn't be longer, they should be shorter than then.
Re:Simple, market-based solution (Score:3, Insightful)
You don't have to outlaw depreciation. Simply require the copyright owner to register the work and it's value. The trick is, require the owner to sell the work to any party offering the registered value. That way, undervaluing his work to save on taxes risks loosing ownership of the work.
Re:I'm glad someone's pointing out this fraud (Score:5, Insightful)
Editing and typesetting should not make a new copyright. It adds no useful art, unless it make massive changes to the original. If it is just to make the original clear why the heck should they get any copyright on it?
Re:I'm glad someone's pointing out this fraud (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, stealing is a good term for activities of that sort.
No need to resort to broken arguments, and stoop to the level of the copyright maximalists. Very righteous logic is on our side. Unlike mere copyright infringement, claiming copyright over a work in the public domain is indeed a form of theft. That's not something that the legions of filesharers do. These thieves claim to be the originators of a work (plagiarism), or owners or rights holders (squatting), or, the main point of course, try to insinuate that these works must be paid for (fraud) and shake suckers down for money.
Re:Keen (Score:5, Insightful)
Copyright doesn't protect ideas at all -- you can use ideas extracted from copyrighted works as you like. Copyright merely protects particular expressions of an idea (and even that has some limits). The trick is in identifying what's an idea and what's an expression, since the dividing line is quite fuzzy.
Anyway, though, when you create a derivative work, such as a movie based upon a fairy tale, you can only get a copyright to the copyrightable material you add, not the underlying material. So to take Disney's version of Snow White as an example, the basic story of a wicked stepmother, beautiful princess, magic mirror, etc. are all free for the taking by anyone, even if they are taking these from the Disney version, rather than an older source. But the parts that Disney added, such as the visual appearance of these characters (e.g. Snow White's blue and yellow dress, or the names of the dwarves) are copyrighted.
Since anyone else can make their own version of Snow White and compete with Disney, it's not a big problem. It would be terrible, though, and unconstitutional, to give Disney rights over the underlying Snow White story just because they happened to make a movie based on it.
As for the length of copyright, while I don't mind the idea of varying lengths depending on the type of work (e.g. a book needs a longer term than software, which needs a longer term than a daily newspaper), and I strongly support the idea of short terms with renewals if the author timely requests them, I see little reason to differentiate between original and derivative works. They're both equally desired by the public, and while some might dismiss derivatives as being less artistic, it is not the place of the government to set policy based on what some bureaucrat's taste in art is.
Re:Capitalism at it's finest (Score:2, Insightful)
Speaking metaphorically -
American society is in its teens. We're past the rebellious stage and about entering productive society, producing great bounds of innovation in technical infrastructure. However, we were brought up as a hardworking people, highly motivated, but with a rather vicious sweet tooth. With our new status in society it is becoming easier and easier to obtain sugary treats and so we gorge ourselves.
.
I believe that eventually we'll realize the source of those stomach aches. Eventually we'll even reach a balance with the teachings of our parents and what we feel to be true. We will come to know our bodies and understand how much we will be able to eat. It may not be enough to avoid diabetes, but it will keep us from being sick. Heck, maybe we'll even be able to cope well with the disease and make it hardly a damper on our function.
.
For fear of being misunderstood I'll explain what I am getting at:
Alternative models will not be immediately effective in many cases but there are some really viable options which, I believe, could surface as people become use to freely distributed content. The failure of major projects due to lack of public support will be necessary to bring out the necessity of this mentality, but I can idealize a point in which communities fund projects based on their needs and interests while corporate ventures monetize consumer good will, advertising, improved efficiencies, improved tangible products, merchandising, and/or plenty of other possible revenue sources.
.
So then, shall we gorge until a violent amount of convulsion or shall we probe these boundaries closely? Considering corporate policies, influence, and ridiculous claims on copyright violations, I will suppose the former.
A bit of both, as per usual (Score:4, Insightful)
Yup. And just as soon as the Slashdot Hive Mind Project comes online we may be able to do that. Until such time, you'd have an easier job herding the proverbial cats. We're not a political party; we don't do positions. And if we did, you can bet we'd have slashdotters speaking out against it, faster than you can say "first post!"
Umm... no. Abolishing copyright would abolish the legal mechanism enabling the GPL, it is true. On the other hand, misuse of copyright is largely evil that the GPL was created to remedy. Opposing copyright abolition on the grounds that it would destroy the GPL is rather like opposing the eradication of Malaria on the grounds that malaria vaccines save so many lives. Still, so long as Malaria exists, malaria vaccines remain a force for good. Similarly, while copyright remains on the statue books, the GPL likewise remainse a force for good. YMMV, obviously.
Another way to look at it: The GPL is a lot like buying a slave in order to set him or her free. Slavery is evil, as I think we'd all agree. On the other hand, given a society in which the law permits human slavery, it is still possible to find ethical applications for those same laws, even though the intent of the law runs entirely to the contrary
Doesn't follow. You could make a good case for "if we expect companies to respect the GPL then we should respect the copyrights of others and therefore not share or download material without permissions from the rights holders". It's just that you didn't actually say that. Call me a pedant if you will.
Re:Combating Cyberfraud (Score:3, Insightful)
Laudable idea, except what you're essentially doing is creating a license for something that by law should be unencumbered. If that's required, the public domain is indeed dead..
Re:Disney does it with fairy tales (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I'm glad someone's pointing out this fraud (Score:3, Insightful)
Editing and typesetting should not make a new copyright. It adds no useful art, unless it make massive changes to the original. If it is just to make the original clear why the heck should they get any copyright on it?
The problem with the law is specifying differences in a meaningful way. There's making the original clear: different font / repagination. And there's making the original clear: scanning velum for obliterated texts under later texts and transliterating/translating into modern scripts/language.
These are vastly different undertakings. The former can be 1 minute choosing a new font. The later can be many years poring over high resolution scans using novel scanning techniques and textual analysis to interpret the most likely letter in a given position, etc.. The later situation should be rewarded in some way, the breadth of historical knowledge has been re-enlarged. The former is laughably trivial. Both are "making the original clear".
Re:I don't see how Disney is the origin (Score:3, Insightful)
Disney are using "PINOCCHIO" (case isn't important) to indicate that the goods or services thus marked originate with them.
Then what name are people supposed to use to indicate that a doll is 1. based on a likeness from an adaptation of the 1883 novel Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi, and 2. not made by Disney?