I Eat Rainbows

(Note: this is part of a series of posts where I publish the essays I have had to write for the International Baccalaureate. I might as well get some mileage from them, right? See the index page for more details.)

For some reason this essay got a C. I still haven’t figured out why, and the IB doesn’t tell you.

This essay is released under the GNU General Public License, version 2. Here is a pdf, and source follows.

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%   Copyright 2007 Sohum Banerjea

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%   This essay is released under copyleft; you can redistribute it

%   and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public

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\lhead{Sohum Banerjea}

\chead{Candidate code: clq357}

\rhead{Session number: 001161-002}

\begin{document}

\bibliographystyle{agms}

\title{Is copyright still relevant? A discussion of change, new technology and

an old idea.}

\author{Sohum Banerjea}

\maketitle

\begin{center}

Candidate Code: clq357 \par

Session Number: 001161-002 \par

Word Count: 3371

\end{center}

\begin{abstract}

 Although copyright has been an extremely useful concept in the

 development of our society, its effectiveness and validity

 have been brought under question by the emergence of fast,

 unrestricted copying and dissemination tools, namely, the

 computer and the network.

The additional restrictions placed upon copyright in an

 attempt to keep it relevant have caused copyright to stray

 from its original aim of providing an incentive to innovate to

 protecting already innovated ideas.

Thus, an attempt must be made to wholly change and rewrite our

 concept of copyright.

The copyright reformation movements which have risen today

 have supplied us with valuable insight into the good ideas

 which can be implemented, and the mistakes which can be

 avoided during this attempt.

\end{abstract}

\newpage{}

Copyright is a concept, giving the legal right to copy a

work to someone. The ``work'' must generally meet certain minimum

standards of originality, and the ``someone'' is usually the person who

created the work.

Copyright has its history in the popularisation of the printing press, when

Charles the Second of England, became concerned at the unfair copying of

books. The Statute of Anne, of 1710 \citep{anne}, is recognised as the next major step,

giving the author of a book up to twenty-one years of ``the right to copy''

their book, in the form of printing and thus selling copies.

The Statute of Anne grew out of older concepts regarding the right of

the author who created the work to have control over its distribution,

of the right of investors into the book to gain monetary compensation,

and the rights of consumers who owned a copy of the book, treating the

copy as property. These, known as the ``common-law rights'', as they

were not enforced by any statutory law but were commonly held to be in

effect anyway, were the subject of much debate later in England's history.

Before the printing press, there was little opportunity to test these

concepts, as making a full copy of a work was a laborious and

time-intensive process. Upon the introduction of the printing press,

it was possible to mass produce books -- but it was prohibitively

expensive unless one wished to resell these copies. Of course, it

was the publishers who then first sought to regulate the copying, and this

led to the Statute of Anne.

When the first copyrights began to expire, a debate erupted about

whether the publishers still then had a common-law copyright in

perpetuity. The view of copyright as a property right emerged out of

this, where copyright was held to be analogous to the rights obtained

by owning physical goods.

The state overturned this idea, ruling that they had effectively limited

copyright to those fourteen to twenty-one years, and that the

publishers could not expect a perpetual monopoly on the right to

copy, and thus publish, works.

It is then plain that copyright's sole purpose was to encourage

innovation by giving a temporary monopoly, a reward, to publishers and

taking a right the public had but could not use, the right to copy. As

\citet{rmscopy}

argues, copyright was a bargain made between the producers and the

consumers, taking away something that was essentially worthless to the

consumer -- the ability to copy the books they owned -- in exchange for a

greater pervasion of media.

The original copyright was only applied to books, but as

methods and techniques for widespread creation and duplication of

differing media, such as paintings and photos, video, and music, have emerged,

copyright has been extended to them as well. The view of the property

right also grew into prominence during this period.

Copyright today has been internationalised thanks to the Berne

Convention, and is applied to any creative work as soon as it is

``fixed'' to a medium. The author is granted exclusive rights to the

distribution of the work, as well as any derivative works, until he

disclaims them or the copyright expires. This is indicative of a

culture where an author ``owns'' the work, and thus has the legal

right to do with it whatever he wishes.

Our concepts of ownership and copyright are associated with a

particular work. If I write an essay, like the one you are reading, my

work is now copyrighted by me. Someone can write an essay which is word

for word identical to mine, and then we both have separate copyrights

on the individual essays, regardless that one can be seen as a copy of

the other. With information in physical form, however, the chances

against this happening are astronomical; thus in most

cases it is assumed that one or the other has plagiarised, and we can

turn to physical evidence (in the worst case scenario, the ink can be

chemically dated) to determine which is the original.

Not so on the internet. It is very easy to make a bit-for-bit

identical copy of an intellectual manifestation, which can then be

copied several times over and scattered to the far corners of the

world within seconds. Since these copies are, by definition,

identical, and thus don't have any distinguishing features like those a

physical copy would, it is impossible to determine, (by comparing

these bits), the additional information about which copy was the

original. Since any attempt to transfer this information about data

will also have to be transferred as data, as bits, and thus can also

be made a one-to-one copy of or even removed entirely, no distinction

can be made between the original, and the copy.

The restrictions imposed upon a society in its formative stage will

cause said society to form around and to conform to these

restrictions. The converse -- that any freedoms the hatchling society

enjoys, that any restrictions not imposed on the society will not be

honoured within it is also true. Our physical society, when forming,

had an actual restriction, in the form of the laws of physics, against

copying objects, and thus formed a way of rewarding original

copy-creators and restricting copying. The internet society, when

forming, did not have a restriction when it came to copying anything,

and thus, the moral concept of a ``right to copy'' did not form. A

culture has formed where this concept that certain people have a

``right'' to copy something, while others don't, is not even

thinkable.

Consider this thought experiment. Suppose a lifeform existed that was

able to rearrange matter to mimic another set of matter. Now consider

their society, as it forms and develops. It is plain to see that they

will never come up with the concept of ``copyright'', as they can

create copies very easily. It will be natural to them to copy things

and as unnatural to impose restrictions on it as it would be for us to

restrict moving our limbs.

It is also plain that their society's economy will not collapse

uncontrollably because publisher's revenues are slowly eaten away,

as they will have never developed the concept of publishing, at least

as we know it, in the first place. Their society will develop a

different way to reward innovation than the one we are familiar with.

This is exactly what has happened on the internet. The internet

society, regarding copying digital objects as natural and restrictions

against this copying as unnatural, disregard copyright. It is merely

the mismatch between this and the rules that have emerged in our

physical world that causes problems.

Our copyright grew out of a situation where it was assumed that any

copying done would be for profit. This was because a significant

monetary and time investment was required to ``copy'' something --

that is, to produce the original \emph{en mass}. Neither of these

investments are required on the internet, and thus any possible

motivations for even thinking about the ramifications of copying are

removed by the simplicity and accessibility of the ``Copy'' button.

I am writing this essay within a plain text file. As soon as I make

this text file available on the internet, anyone can copy it and use

it for their purposes within seconds, without any way to determine

which is the original.

With copyright in effect, this person should be penalised for making

the exact copy, whatever it's purpose, just as if they rewrote and

bound George Orwell's ``1984'' by hand.

Today, the public has the tools to create an exact bit-for-bit copy of

any work that can be represented digitally. The computer and the

internet are the ultimate copying and distribution tool, not only of media

we already know, but of any future form of media that can be represented in

bits. Thus, the bargain, made centuries ago, where the public gave up

an effectively worthless right, has changed. Now, the public can

easily copy and distribute anything, and thus it is not something they

are willing to give up.

Traditional media companies, who own the most copyrights in today's

world, and thus have the most to lose if the copyright system is

abolished, have actively resisted any change. Their entire business

model is built on the difficulty and illegality of duplication of

works; that is, copyright. Thus a Digital Millennium

Copyrights Act (DMCA) has been passed in the United States of America,

setting the precedent for many similar bills in other countries. It

attempts to control and criminalise the ignoring of copyright, and protects

the intentions of technology such as Digital Rights Management (DRM).

This DRM is fundamentally flawed because it tries to express the concept of

originality that cannot be embodied within bits with bits.  This has

led to widespread ``cracking'' of weaker forms of DRM (that is, most

of it), even though the DMCA explicitly makes this illegal, and,

eventually all it causes is mere inconvenience. Also, the global

internet society, transgressing as it does legal boundaries, makes it

next to impossible to track down copyright violations. Attempts like

the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) have been made to

allow international legal protection of copyright, but they are

largely ineffective. It is also worth noting that copyright violations are so

rampant that most effort is focused on larger names and copyrights,

usually the ones with the most money.

It is also interesting to note the actions of the United States

government on the copyright issue. They have not only made the longest

possible copyright term the default term, but it has acquired a habit,

recently, of extending the length of copyright whenever major

copyrights, like those of Mickey Mouse, and the ones previously held

by Jonathan Swift, are about to expire. The practical upshot of this

is, that in the 1900s, most work from roughly the 1880s and earlier

were in the public domain, freely available for the layperson to work

on, while today, in the 2000s, almost no work later than the 1930s is

similarly available. \citep{copyrightflowchart}

So, not only is copyright, as a concept, is meaningless when ``Copy''

buttons are as accessible as they are, but copyright itself is failing

to live up to the standards it used to have.

The alternative methodologies hinted at in the above hypothetical are

now emerging. Two separate but closely connected organisations have formed, the Free

Software Foundation, and Creative Commons, speaking for open source

and copyleft licenses. They argue for the same basic thing: to

allow creative and intellectual manifestations to be freely copyable,

modifiable, and redistributable.

To borrow a quote from these movements, they wish to promote a

culture in which works are ``free as in speech, not free as in

beer.'' \citep{freeasinbeer}

Lightly called ``copyleft'', as a play on the word ``copyright'', the

licenses these movements have created deliberately waive certain

rights allowed by copyright. They

explicitly allow anyone who receives a copy to not only make further

copies, but to study, share, change, and distribute these changed

works. Some include a clause stating that any derivative works must

also be released under the same license, effectively forcing the work to

remain forever unbound by copyright.

Copyleft has not only worked; it has thrived. The GNU

General Public License (GPL), particularly, has allowed the

massively-distributed creation of an entire operating system that is at

least as good and in many situations better than traditionally developed

operating systems. Creative works licensed under copyleft licenses have

allowed them to be built upon and redistributed in massive quantities.

As an example of a copyleft-based creator, there is Jonathon Coulton,

a songwriter, composer, and singer.

JoCo, as he is affectionately known to his fans, has his songs

licensed under a Creative Commons license. This has spawned numerous

derivative works, including music videos, and even fan-fiction, and a

contest in the mainstream magazine ``Popular Science'', thereby generating

huge amounts of exposure, and boosting him to success. (It doesn't hurt

that he is an excellent artist.)

As mentioned above, there are two major copyleft movements. The older

one is the Free Software Foundation (FSF), which maintains their flagship

GNU General Public License, (as well as all other related licenses).

It was created by Richard Stallman, arguably the founder of copyleft.

The GPL is a curious license, which waives most, if not all, rights

that the author of a work is entitled to, but it adds two constraints.

The resulting work has to also be licensed with the GPL (this

requirement has caused the GPL to be labelled ``viral'', which is an

accurate description, though the word has its negative connotations),

and all GPL-licensed works make their ``source'', a non-degradable and

easily-manipulable version of the work, freely available.

The FSF, as evidenced by their name, focus mainly on software. The

Creative Commons movement was formed more recently to try and transfer

the success the GPL has enjoyed to other media. They have been successful in

drawing attention to the inadequacies of copyright and the alternatives.

The movements describe their licenses as ``an alternative to copyright''

(although, realistically, they harness the power of copyright today to

enforce their restrictions -- a clever way around the system which

was first thought of by Richard Stallman, with the GPL). The licenses

are basically ``mix and match'' sets of restrictions that the creator

of a work can apply on his work. These include Attribution, the

requirement that further distribution and derivations of the work

contain a pointer back to the original creator; Non-Commercial,

guaranteeing that no-one can profit of your work; and Share Alike,

an implementation of the GPL's ``viral'' nature.

There are licenses for combinations of these restrictions, and

all of them are presented in a human-readable, a machine-readable and

a lawyer-readable version.

In many respects, though, Creative Commons has failed. They have

diluted their brand and rejected their implied goal of creating a

creative commons by allowing licenses such as

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (which merely pays lip service to

the ideals in question). This is seen as a missed opportunity, as

creators can then use these licenses, which barely confer any further

freedoms than copyright, and still feel as if they are part of

the movement. \citep{ccnc}

The requirement that any derivative works also be licensed under the

same license is an interesting idea, and speaks of Stallman's

foresight. It creates another domain, separate to that of copyrighted

works and the public domain, which is self-contained in the sense that once a

work enters it, it cannot leave.

This is important. What this ensures is that any work, once licensed by a

GPL-like ``viral'' license, is guaranteed to forever be freely available to anyone.

However, this is only valid if my comment about the source

being a non-degradable version is strictly true. Unfortunately, it is

not.

The GPL, and other ``viral'' licenses merely require you to provide

the source \emph{of your own copy}, and the Creative Commons

ShareAlike option does not even require this. In whatever

sense the modifications you have made are degradations, the copy that

you are providing is degraded already. An obvious example where this

modifications is clearly degradation is cropping or resizing an image,

or stripping functionality out of software.

In the programming world, there is a deeply ingrained \emph{cultural}

requirement to preserve the original somehow -- a major GPL supporter,

the Debian Project, maintains the original version of all source code

they modify and integrate side-by-side with their modifications. More

generally, code is a medium which it is relatively difficult to degrade, at

least, if you want the code to work afterwards.

There are only a few possible changes code can absorb and still function,

and thus, under most situations, the problem never really arises.

Unfortunately, this is not true for other media. Now, there is no

preexisting cultural requirement to preserve the original. Even if

one existed, the feasibility of storing copies of the original of rich

media along with your copy drop sharply when compared to code,  and it

is extremely easy and simple, (and common, comprising the bulk of

further modifications), to degrade these media. The media in question

do not have a simple undo process.

\citep{dim-gplvcc}

There is talk of bringing in a Preserve-Original option to the

Creative Commons licenses, but the practical issues alone stop this.

It would arguably be a major, unnecessary deterrent in the adoption and

use of these licenses.

This brings up another point, that these restrictions are only

possible because of the power that the creator holds. The copyleft

holders are able to force consumers to agree to the terms (chiefly,

the ShareAlike term) purely because of the overarching power of

copyright today. This means that the copyleft domain may be orphaned

as effectively as the public domain has been, by new changes in

copyright law.

This is the other problem with the copyleft of today: it is entirely

possible that every piece of work under the licenses will find the

copyleft restrictions suddenly freed, and the works then effectively

placed in the public domain, unless the transition is managed

smoothly.

So much for the practicalities. There is also a philosophical side to

copyleft. Since copyright is inherently selfish, it places the benefit

of the individual (the content creator) above those of the public (who

would be benefited from this creative work entering public

availability). Thus, it is a good fit for a capitalist economy,

wherein, by definition, people and corporations capitalise on others.

Copyleft is an antithesis. It ensures that the content creator will

not be able to capitalise on his work by decreasing the benefit to the

public. Any capitalisation of the work must be done within the

framework of public availability, instead of the other way around. It

does reduce the rights of the content creator, but this is to be

expected.

It is clear that the internet, because of its

structure and origin, is communal and definitely not capitalist. It

contains capitalist extensions of our physical world, but due to its

very nature, where every network packet, every bit of information

travelling through it is given equal priority, it cannot be

capitalist.

(Incidentally, the Internet Service Providers who control

large parts of the backbone of the internet are slowly making attempts

to specifically prioritise packets for capitalist purposes. An immense

outcry has risen against this effort, under the name of ``Save Net

Neutrality'', showing that the communal internet is the preferred

model. \citep{google-nn} )

There are copyleft-based companies, making their way in our capitalist

world, but they are not generally large. The reason for this is that

large companies run contrary to the ideals of greatest benefits for

the most people. The aim of copyleft is to address the shortcomings of

copyright in today's world, which include an excessive concentration

of wealth gained by essentially exploiting the copyright mechanism

\citep{osbillions}.

Thus, in the court of public opinion, copyright as it exists has

essentially become defunct. It is next-to-impossible to enforce, is flawed

deeply in today's world, has promising alternatives, and runs contrary

to global humanist ideals.

Copyright was never intended to be a property right. It was never

meant to confer the properties of physical objects on ``pure

thought-stuff'', as it were. It was meant to extend and support

innovation by providing an incentive to innovate in the first place. A

copyright system where the right to copy is treated as property, that

is not only owned by the person while he is alive but also by his

descendants long after he is dead runs contrary to this ideal.

There will certainly be some major change to copyright law within the next

generation -- the system as it exists today is far too unstable to

endure. What

is still undetermined is how the law will change, and what freedoms it will

confer to whom.

The internet medium has given our culture the opportunity to bring our

society back in line with the original ideals of a free culture, by

giving us the technology and capabilities required to freely make use

of our culture.

All that remains to be seen is whether we shall take this opportunity, or

not.

This work is licensed under the GNU General Public License.

All rights reversed.

\newpage{}

{\small

\begin{thebibliography}{Creative Commons (0000)}

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 	public must prevail}. From

 	\url{http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/reevaluating-copyright.html}

 \bibitem[Scott, 2001]{frictionless}

 	Scott B. (2001). \emph{Copyright in a frictionless world:

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 \bibitem[Lessig, 2004]{freeculture}

 	Lessig, L. (2004). \emph{Free culture}. New York, NY: Penguin Group.

 \bibitem[Skala, 2004a]{colour1}

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 \bibitem[Skala, 2004b]{colour2}

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 	(2007). \emph{History}. retrieved June 31, 2007 from

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 \bibitem[Stallman, 2005a]{fsfwhatis}

 	Stallman R. M. (2005). \emph{What is copyleft?}. from

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 \bibitem[Stallman, 2005b]{pragmatic}

 	Stallman R. M. (2005). \emph{Copyleft: pragmatic

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 \bibitem[Pilgrim, 2007]{dim-gplvcc}

 	Pilgrim M. (2007). \emph{In which I simultaneously

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 \bibitem[Avalon Project()]{anne}

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 \bibitem[Lessig, 2006]{freeasinbeer}

 	Lessig, L. (2006). \emph{Free, as in beer}. Wired,

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 \bibitem[Pilgrim, 2006]{ccnc}

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 \bibitem[Google, 2007]{google-nn}

 	(2007).

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 \bibitem[Bromberg and Sunstein()]{copyrightflowchart}

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\end{thebibliography}

}

\end{document}