August Break.
Hey everyone: it's been quiet around here because I'm on vacation for August (and have already been for part of July).
No, this is not because copyright reform must involve long vacations. It's just that I'm in the middle of a move, and need some extra time to complete it. (But I admit there are a few beaches involved too.) Someday, it will be the case that just because I take a break doesn't mean QuestionCopyright.org does — but we're not there yet.
See you in September, and enjoy your summer (or winter, if you're in the Southern hemisphere).
-Karl Fogel
Help Wanted -- We're Launching the Ghost Works Survey
We're launching the Ghost Works Survey, and you can help.
The Ghost Works Survey is a project to investigate how often, and in what ways, copyright prevents artists from making new derivative works.
In the article "Seen Any Ghost Works Lately?", we defined a ghost work as a creative work that never got made, or was made but not released, because copyright concerns prevented it from being started or from being distributed. Since then, informal conversations with artists, publishers and others have made it very clear that such suppression is a common event, much more common than most people think. But the public rarely hears about it, because no one does publicity for a work that doesn't exist.
The purpose of the Ghost Works Survey is twofold: to demonstrate the scope and scale of this phenomenon by gathering and organizing as much data about it as we can, and to highlight compelling individual stories of artists and other creators who had their work thwarted by copyright restrictions. The survey will not attempt to catalogue every ghost work — there are likely far too many, given that almost every artist we've talked to so far has a story of a work they had to alter or lay aside due to copyright concerns. Rather, we'll focus on qualitative results: we want to collect enough stories to discern large-scale patterns, so we can understand and publicize the effects of copyright suppression. For more information, see the projects page.
If you want to help, or are interested but want to know more before committing, please send an email to:
The time commitment will only be as great as you want it to be — we'll need help with tasks both large and small. Since much of the project involves receiving and processing stories from artists, our capacity is directly proportional to the number of volunteers: the more people are involved, the more we can do! QuestionCopyright.org can provide technical infrastructure and planning, but there is no substitute for human minds.
We'll also need some volunteers willing to take on specific responsibilities: for example, a maintainer for a MySpace page and a maintainer for a Facebook page (because we need to make it as easy as possible for people to send us stories).
And we welcome ideas, of course — please leave suggestions as comments on this article.
Talking on Copyright at ApacheCon EU in Amsterdam, April 9th.
If you're in or near Amsterdam in the second week of April, come on over to ApacheCon EU, the 2008 European conference of the Apache Software Foundation. There are a lot of interesting speakers and sessions going on, not all of them technical (for example, "Open Source Business in Europe" by Arje Cahn).
I'll be giving a talk entitled Creation Myths: Three Centuries of Open Source and Copyright, on Wednesday, 9 April, at 5:30pm. It's about the similarities between today's open source movement and the creative world of the pre-copyright era, how copyright and centralized distribution gradually changed the nature of creativity, and how open source and decentralized distribution are changing it back again — but with some new twists. (This is an updated version of a talk I gave last summer at OSS2007 in Ireland.) We'll also look at some non-software business models based on unrestricted information flow and collaboration.
Slides are here: OpenOffice.org (ODP), Adobe PDF, Microsoft PowerPoint (PPT).
Control At Any Cost: Copyright vs Christian Rock
Reader C. Michael Pilato sent us this story...
I've known about the terms "copyright" and "trademark" for as long as I've been able to read cereal boxes at the breakfast table. But I didn't became aware of copyright and the surrounding issues until I was in college. Sadly, our introduction wasn't all handshakes and smiles.
I play the guitar. I started teaching myself how to do this in high school, when my primary taste in music was so-called Christian rock. I carried my interest in the guitar with me into college at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where I developed a second love affair – with the Internet.
At some point early in my college days, someone introduced me to OLGA, the Online Guitar Archive. OLGA had the straightforward goal of providing a single location where guitarists of all shapes and sizes could download and contribute plaintext files that described how to play particular pieces of classical or popular music on the guitar. I gathered while traipsing around through newsgroups and such that OLGA was pretty popular with amateur guitarists like myself. There was only one small problem with OLGA from my perspective – it didn't have much music from the bands I listened to. So, I decided to dedicate a portion of the web-accessible disk space allotted to me by UNCC to host a site like OLGA, but dedicated to contemporary Christian music (CCM). And with just a handful of transcriptions I'd done myself (and also submitted to OLGA for inclusion there), and some severely lacking website design skills, I began the CCM Guitar Music Archives.
Presenting at O'Reilly's Tools of Change for Publishing Conference
I'll be giving a talk at the O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference in New York City next week: Beyond Numbers: Gatekeeper Effects and Just-in-Time Publishing, on Tuesday, February 12th, at 2pm; conference details here. The talk is on the commercial potential of on-demand publishing of freely-licensed material, even as a storefront business model, and how it could mean a richer and more participatory experience for readers, authors, and booksellers.
Cease and Desist Censorship
A US court has found that copyright law can cover "cease-and-desist letters", that is, letters sent by copyright holders telling someone to stop distributing copyrighted content.
Cease-and-desist letters are frequently used as tools of censorship (as Chilling Effects has ably documented). A common scenario is that someone gets upset at having something of theirs quoted, and is able to shut down the quotation by claiming copyright over its text and then sending C&D letters to anyone who displays it. The quoted text is not royalty-generating for the copyright holder (not that it would excuse censorship even if it were); rather, the sender of the C&D is simply using copyright law as a tool to prevent the publication of potentially embarrassing information — that is, to censor.
Musicians Censoring Themselves
Reader Ben Collins-Sussman sent us this letter after watching a group of hobbyist banjo players in an Internet forum shy away from sharing music because they were worried about copyright issues. It's hard to add to Ben's eloquent outrage, but we should step back and ask: how did we get here? When did the inconceivable become everyday? When did musicians start censoring themselves as a matter of course? (Notice how copyright issues actually come up twice, independently, in the forum Ben points to. That's two times in a discussion that's only nineteen posts long. It would be nice if this were somehow exceptional... but sadly, it's not.)
Here's Ben's letter:
I frequent exciting websites like www.banjohangout.org, where banjoists from all over the world (all 12 of us!) talk about banjos, songs we like, how to play things, and so on.
Swedish Pirate Party's Influence Beginning to Show...
Seven members of the Swedish Parliament have published an opinion piece calling for the decriminalization of filesharing. Written in reaction to a government analyst's recommendation that file-sharers be punished by losing their Internet connections, the letter is practically a verbatim recitation of what the Swedish Pirate Party has been saying for a long time now:
"...Decriminalizing all non-commercial file sharing and forcing the market to adapt is not just the best solution. It's the only solution, unless we want an ever more extensive control of what citizens do on the Internet. Politicians who play for the antipiracy team should be aware that they have allied themselves with a special interest that is never satisfied and that will always demand that we take additional steps toward the ultimate control state..."
When he visited the United States last summer, Rick Falkvinge, the Pirate Party's founder, pointed out that one of the Party's most important functions was educating other politicians. By competing for seats in Parliament, the Party forces other candidates to give more attention to copyright and patent issues, out of fear of losing votes to the Pirates. It looks like that's exactly what's happened here. If so, kudos to Rick and the Pirate Party: they've made a powerful argument for valuing civil liberties over obsolete business models, and it's clearly catching on when members of Parliament from the Moderate Party adopt a major plank from the Pirate Party platform.
[Update: Over at the P2P Consortium, there's a good new interview with Rick Falkvinge up. Shameless confession: we're very pleased to see the references there to Falkvinge's speaking tour here last summer, which QuestionCopyright.org arranged.]
Help Keep Bibliographic Data License-Free
The Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Information at the Library of Congress has just released its final Draft Report. There's much that's good in it, but it's lacking an important feature: an insistence that bibliographic data be license-free, as per point 8 of the Open Government Data Principles. (See also Jonathan Gray's post about this, and the Open Knowledge Foundation petition.)
This may just be an oversight on the working group's part, or it may reflect some deeper hesitancy about committing fully to the public domain. They've asked for comments on the draft, though, and it would be great if they heard from a lot of people about this. You can send them comments here:
Here's what I sent them...
Open Government Data Principles
This Friday and Saturday, I took part in a working group meeting of 30 open government advocates, organized by Carl Malamud and Tim O'Reilly, to develop a set of Open Government Data Principles.
One of the few bright spots in United States copyright law has always been that data produced by the government is, in theory, in the public domain. While there have of course been encroachments on this doctrine from time to time, it has generally been been held to in practice as well as in theory.
Unfortunately, being in the public domain isn't necessarily the same as being online and accessible in reasonable formats via modern protocols. For example, Carl Malamud has spent a fair amount of effort prying the raw records of copyright registrations out of the U.S. Copyright Office at the Library of Congress and putting them online in a much more useful way than the government ever had. Similar stories abound among those with experience extracting electronic data from governments.
