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Los Angeles, CA - Last week a website called "library.nu" disappeared. A coalition of international scholarly publishers accused the site of piracy and convinced a judge in Munich to shut it down. ...
And not just any books - not romance novels or the latest best-sellers - but scholarly books: textbooks, secondary treatises, obscure monographs, biographical analyses, technical manuals, collections of cutting-edge research in engineering, mathematics, biology, social science and humanities.
The texts ranged from so-called "orphan works" (out-of-print, but still copyrighted) to recent issues; from poorly scanned to expertly ripped; from English to German to French to Spanish to Russian, with the occasional Japanese or Chinese text. It was a remarkable effort of collective connoisseurship. Even the pornography was scholarly: guidebooks and scholarly books about the pornography industry. For a criminal underground site to be mercifully free of pornography must alone count as a triumph of civilisation.
...Library.nu was making...learning possible where publishers have not. It made a good show of being a "book review" site - it was called library.nu after all, and not "bookstore.nu". It was not cluttered with advertisements, nor did it "suggest" other books constantly. It gave straight answers to straightforward searches, and provided user reviews of the 400,000 or more books in the database.
It was only the fact that library.nu included a link to another site ("sharehosting" sites like ifile.it, megaupload.com, or mediafire.com) containing the complete version of a digital text that brought library.nu into the realm of what passes for crime these days.
...library.nu was facilitating discovery: the ability to search deeper and deeper into the musical or scholarly tastes fellow humans and to discover their connections that no recommendation algorithm will ever be able to make. In their effort to control this market, publishers alongside the movie and music industry have been effectively criminalising sharing, learning and creating - not stealing.
My vids are 100% my own so I should have nothing to fear when I up load them to YouTube -- or so you'd think. ...
On three occasions now, I have received emails from YouTube advising me that a content/copyright claim has been made against one of my videos. These claims allege that I have used someone else's content without permission and therefore, the claimant will get any revenues that might arise from advertising that appears on those videos.
How on earth can that happen -- when the videos in question contain no third-party footage, no third party images and no music at all?
In 1959 (as I recall), my mother, an acclaimed professional artist, had entered a handful of her oil paintings into an annual art show. Someone attending the show noted that one particular work, the face of a peasant boy, strongly resembled a photograph that had appeared in Life magazine. Well, there was no coincidence about it: Mom had studied precisely that face, and her work was based on that photograph. (The card tacked to the wall actually said so, if anyone had bothered to read it.)
So it was that the local newspaper "exposed" my mother as a fraud, a counterfeiter. It ran a story with the painting next to the Life magazine photograph itself. Thus began a lifelong dialog that became one of the threads of my life: a case study in fair use that fueled endless debates in the Socratic method between Mom and her art students for the next four decades.
...the true problem we face as a people and as a society, as we continue to take what truly are the first steps in the age of digital communication, is that we don't know what we're talking about. It's impossible to legislate a principle that we have not yet defined in the public mind.
...I'm guessing that the people who ran MegaUpload were knowingly profiting from the unauthorized download of other people's intellectual property (including mine). Probably they were making a lot of money that way. That's certainly illegal, and it doesn't exactly give them the moral high ground either. In fact, it's kind of a dick move. Essentially, they did bad things and they got in trouble for it. Here are the issues that, for me, make this complicated.
...Make good stuff, then make it easy for people to buy it. There’s your anti-piracy plan. ...right now everyone’s fighting to control distribution channels, which is why I can’t watch Star Wars on Netflix or iTunes. It’s fine if you want to have that fight, but don’t yell and scream about how you’re losing business to piracy when your stuff isn’t even available in the box I have on top of my TV.
A few months ago, the Italian Wikipedia community made a decision to blank all of Italian Wikipedia for a short period in order to protest a law which would infringe on their editorial independence. The Italian Parliament backed down immediately. As Wikipedians may or may not be aware, a much worse law going under the misleading title of "Stop Online Piracy Act' is working its way through Congress on a bit of a fast track. ... My own view is that a community strike was very powerful and successful in Italy and could be even more powerful in this case. There are obviously many questions about whether the strike should be geotargetted (US-only), etc. (One possible view is that because the law would seriously impact the functioning of Wikipedia for everyone, a global strike of at least the English Wikipedia would put the maximum pressure on the US government.) At the same time, it's of course a very very big deal to do something like this, it is unprecedented for English Wikipedia. ...
What SOPA's principal sponsors appear to be doing, says Parness, is "clarifying the Copyright Act. ..."
His analysis indicates that the intent of the bill is to focus on specific instances where a foreign site gives clear reason to be suspected of activities that are already illegal from a U.S.-based site, and take such actions against them that are in keeping with what actions may be taken against domestic copyright violations. ...
The safe harbor provisions created by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998 would still apply to Internet service providers...
Urge your lawmakers to oppose censorship – and ask Senator Wyden to read your name during the filibuster.
The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) would ruin so much of what's best about the Internet: They will give the government and corporations new powers to block Americans' access to sites that are accused of copyright infringement, force sites like YouTube to go to new lengths to police users' contributions, and put people in prison for streaming certain content online.
Today everyone is paying close attention to the attempts to have videos documenting police brutality removed from You-Tube. There is a much greater threat looming. HR3261 Allows the U.S. Government to serve any internet provider with a court order to remove what they deem is copyrighted material or be shut down within five days. Under the guise of stopping piracy, any site can be shut down indefinitely.
Here's a new law that won't work:...
MakingLight comments: "Note absence of any concept of a trial, or acknowledgement of difference between civil dispute and criminal offense."
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