The WELL: inkwell.vue.431: Mike Godwin discusses SOPA, PIPA, and the Future of the Internet

#57: Ted Newcomb (tcn) Thu 2 Feb 12 02:25

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 02:25:00 PST

TPP - Looks like it's going to be the battle of the acronyms:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/03/son-of-acta-meet-the-next-secret-copyright-treaty.ars [Read entire topic]

#56: Ted Newcomb (tcn) Mon 30 Jan 12 06:36

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 06:36:00 PST

http://beta620.nytimes.com/viewer/times-skimmer/ Big Victory on Internet Buoys Lobby:

In some ways, it was the awakening of a generation that has come to rely on its right to digital freedom. *What this did show is as a citizen in the Internet age, you have to add the Internet and your digital rights and liberties onto the list of things you need to be worried about if you want to retain your political freedoms,* said Rebecca MacKinnon, a fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of a book on digital rights, *Consent of the Networked.*

A bit more background on how things came together over SOPA/PIPA and where things may go from here.

Obviously a lot of folks will try to hitch their wagons to a so-called movement. I'm skeptical any movement exists. I do think their is a growing awareness of the issues of digital freedom - however ill defined. At this point I think it is more of a Don't Tread on Me stance. User's will react when provoked. The difficulties of definitions of assumed 'rights' are probably what prohibit more pro-active actions --- for the moment.

What do you all think? [Read entire topic]

#55: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Sun 29 Jan 12 10:36

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 10:36:00 PST

Mike, to your question about the links: it sounds like the link was copied after using the "scroll" feature that specifies a specific range of links. I.e. if you spedified a link parameter

&q=0-49

You would only see the first 49 posts.

<gail> created an tinyurl link that will show the first page of the conversation, with a "more" link to subsequent pages:

http://tinyurl.com/inkwell-godwin [Read entire topic]

#54: Ed Ward (captward) Sun 29 Jan 12 08:31

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 08:31:00 PST

Ah, I missed that! [Read entire topic]

#53: Rob Myers (robmyers) Sun 29 Jan 12 07:26

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 07:26:00 PST

Copyright is generally 70 years after death in the EU, and an extension for recording copyright from 50 to 70 years after production was sneaked in last year:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-14882146

This was galling for those of us who'd beaten back the proposal the last couple of times, but given the white heat of entitlement that ageing pop musicians were focusing on the Eurocracy it was hardly surprising. [Read entire topic]

#52: Mike Godwin (mnemonic) Sat 28 Jan 12 12:42

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 12:42:00 PST

<jonl>, I'm noticing some inkwell.vue links don't show more recent postings (e.g., posting #50 above) -- is this some sort of glitch, or a delay in propagation, or something else? I've been sharing links to folks outside the WELL, and I notice that some Web links stop with posting #49. [Read entire topic]

#51: Ed Ward (captward) Sat 28 Jan 12 12:40

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 12:40:00 PST

Let me toss something into the queue here about expiration of copyright. One of the big deals currently is that copyright expires in Europe 50 years after publication, if I'm not mistaken, and next year we're going to see the first of the Beatles catalog go public domain.

Now, I doubt that Paul McCartney will starve as a result (not sure about Ringo), but I think we can expect that as time goes on, living people with marginal incomes may be affected by this, lesser-known performers, songwriters, etc. There could well be one of Gerry's Pacemakers out there who'd like a few extra quid.

Is this being addressed, to you knowledge? Should it be? [Read entire topic]

#50: Mike Godwin (mnemonic) Sat 28 Jan 12 12:07

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 12:07:00 PST

Jon, on Thursday you asked what other legal issues affecting cyberspace law and policy are lurking out there that we ought to be aware of.

One of the obvious areas is privacy: especially in nations outside the United States, there are strong, comprehensive privacy laws that are frequently used these days to compel internet companies to remove content. At Wikipedia, back in 2010, for example, I was asked by a German court to remove the names in the (English language) Wikipedia of two German men who had been convicted of murdering a German television star a couple of decades previously. Under German law, there's the principle that these men had served their prison sentences, and had the right to return to normal lives unencumbered by what potential employers and others might learn about them through Google searches or Wikipedia. Now, even in Germany these renewed privacy rights have limits, as I understand it -- no one had to go to German libraries and use black markers to blot out the names of the convicted murderers in back issues of Der Spiegel, for example. But the online archives of Der Spiegel and other German publications were compelled by court order to remove (or partially remove) the names of the convicted killers, now presumably rehabilitated, at the demand of their lawyers. And German-speaking Wikipedians even complied with their demands as far as the German-language version of Wikipedia is concerned.

Now, we have nothing like that setup in the United States, for better or for worse. (I say "for worse" because I think the United States legal system could do better than it does in allowing for the possibility of rehabilitation, and in reintegrating ex-felons back into productive roles in society -- I'm not wholly unsympathetic to the German individuals who wanted their records cleared.) Plus, there were plenty of bilingual German-English speakers who were offended that the convicted murderers were able to get a certain fraction of history amended or erased -- so what they did, when the German Wikipedia community self-censored regarding the names of the killers, was go right to the English-language Wikipedia and repost them in the article about the murdered German actor, Walter Sedlmayr <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Sedlmayr>. And soon we received demands from the killers' lawyers at Wikimedia headquarters in San Francisco.

The Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia and other projects, is in an unusual editorial position -- WMF is not a publisher like Der Spiegel, but in fact is the host of many different writers, publishers, editors, contributors, and creators who make Wikipedia and the other projects what they are today. And my view is that if the community of Wikipedia editors in the English-language version chose to keep the names of the the murderers in the Sedlmayr article, the Wikimedia Foundation should not pre-empt that decision. And I wrote the German lawyers representing the murderers and let them know this was our position. I could have stopped with that, but there was always the risk that the Germans would seek a judgment in a German court that could be enforced -- through international treaty obligations regarding the recognition and honoring of foreign court judgments -- against WMF in the United States. I decided to make this strategy more problematic for the Germans by letting American journalists know about the whole kerfuffle -- the New York Times (in an article by the WELL's <jswatz>, who has another topic in this conference centering on a lovely book he wrote) published a story about the contretemps, and cleverly included the actual names of the convicted killers. This meant that if the Germans were going to try to bring legal action against Wikipedia in the United States, they were probably going to have to sue the New York Times as well. (The Times story appears here: <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/us/13wiki.html>.)

Now, privacy is only one area of the law in which the United States legal and constitutional framework does not fit well with the laws of other nations, or with international standards -- there are others (notably defamation, which is a lot easier to sue someone about in the UK and in the EU generally than it is here in the USA). So one of the larger issues I see lurking out there for internet policymakers is the fact that, on the one hand, there's a huge impulse to harmonize law among the world's nations (and certainly among the ones that are signatories to multilateral treaties). On the other hand, there are expectations that, if you live within a particular country, your national government ought to have the autonomy to set set standards and expectations consistent with your regional, cultural, and legal norms, regardless of whether they're harmonious with the laws and expectations of other nations. This tension is not likely to be resolved anytime soon -- I imagine that we're going to see world nations struggle over harmonizing internet-related law (and the law regarding whatever may succeed or supplement the internet) throughout this century. I don't expect this tension to end during my lifetime, or even my daughter's lifetime. [Read entire topic]

#49: Mike Godwin (mnemonic) Sat 28 Jan 12 11:34

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 11:34:00 PST

Sorry for having been largely out of touch Friday -- it was one of those days where sudden events end up pulling me out of my office and handling meetings the whole day. So let me try to catch up to some outstanding question.

Jon, you actually have a couple in the queue, so let me tackle them first. A while back -- Tuesday -- you asked whether "we really will rethink at least the duration of copyright?" and "Are there aspects of copyright, other than duration, that could change without disrupting the intended stimulus for creative work?" I don't think I answered your Tuesday questions properly, though I meant to. With regard to duration of copyright, I believe the academic community is already rethinking it -- it's not at all clear that continually extending the term of copyright well beyond the death of the creator adds incentives to create that make any difference at all to the creative to the creative process. If you're a novelist, and someone offers to extend your copyright to (say) 90 years after your death rather than 70 years, does this make it any easier to confront the blank page (or screen). It's hard to say that it does. And it's hard to argue that this even increases the price you might demand if you assign your copyright to someone else, such as a publisher. So the academic community recognizes generally, I think, that the economic incentives for extending duration of copyright are questionable, these days. (I want to be clear here that I do not oppose all extensions of copyright terms that have occurred during the 20th century -- some of the earlier ones made perfect since, as authors begin to live long, and as the formalities of renewing copyright became trickier and more onerou -- but I think we're well past solving that problem, and that the extensions over the last few decades can't be justified that way. Mostly, they represent corporate interests lobbying for extensions, not authors worried about providing income streams for their great grandchildren,)

The policy problem, though, is that it hasn't mattered what a plurality (perhaps a majority) of copyright theorists think -- the processes by which copyright duration has been extended have sidestepped theory altogether. In the United States, that theory has been embodied in U.S. Constitutional language:

Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution, known as the Copyright Clause, empowers the United States Congress "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."

Now, you will note that the Constitution talks about promoting progress and "limited Times" -- not about providing income to creators as the ultimate goal. In fact, it's clear that the Copyright Clause here sees getting creators paid as a means to an end, not an end to itself -- there's nothing here that suggests that "limited Times" was surplus, ignorable language. As a practical matter, the lack of specificity here has given the copyright industries and policymakers in Congress and in the courts carte blanche to say that Congressional additions to the duration of copyrights are within Congress's power. About the only thing you can be sure of with regard to "limited Times" is that Congress probably can't make copyrights of infinite duration.

And because copyright is still seen as itself a relatively arcane area of law for most citizens, you're not seeing Americans rise up and challenge things like the Sonny Bono Act to any great degree. And the academics who are critical of duration extensions tend to be mostly ignored, although Yochai Benkler, among others, is trying to use the SOPA/PIPA protests as a way of reopening the duration debate and awakening a new public dialog about copyright policy.

His job, and the job of the rest of us, is going to be a hard one, though, because we're not just dealing with U.S. law -- the United States, like many other nations, is signatory to international copyright treaties that have had the effect of ratcheting up copyright protections in ways that make it hard for democratic movements within terrestrial jurisdictions to challenge them or reduce them. (Quite often the argument in policy circles is that "we have to increase duration [or modify our copyright laws in other ways] in order to bring us into line with the demands of the treaties we've signed.")

I'm going to talk a little bit more about treaties when I answer tcn's question about ACTA. [Read entire topic]

#48: Ted Newcomb (tcn) Fri 27 Jan 12 02:33

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 02:33:00 PST

Mike, when you have a chance, can you explain ACTA and how it impacts this discussion? This seems to be the agreement we are going to live with at the moment, more narrowly defined. [Read entire topic]