Week 7: Ethics and Law in New Media

November 1-7

Topic 13: The Author vs the Information Society

Read Chapter 3 "Against Intellectual Property" of the Brian Martin's book. Write a blog review (especially, comment on his strategies for change).

What is intellectual property? Intellectual property (IP) is a term referring to a number of distinct types of creations of the mind for which property rights are recognized – and the corresponding fields of law. Under intellectual property law, owners are granted certain exclusive rights to a variety of intangible assets, such as musical, literary, and artistic works; discoveries and inventions; and words, phrases, symbols, and designs. Common types of intellectual property include copyrights, trademarks, patents, industrial design rights and trade secrets in some jurisdictions.

Critisism of intellectual property Some critics of intellectual property, such as those in the free culture movement, point at intellectual monopolies as harming health, preventing progress, and benefiting concentrated interests to the detriment of the masses, and argue that the public interest is harmed by ever expansive monopolies in the form of copyright extensions, software patents and business method patents. There is also criticism because strict intellectual property rights can inhibit the flow of innovations to poor nations. Developing countries have benefited from the spread of developed country technologies, such as the internet, mobile phone, vaccines, and high-yielding grains. Many intellectual property rights, such as patent laws, arguably go too far in protecting those who produce innovations at the expense of those who use them.

The classic argument for copyright is the view that granting developers temporary monopolies over their works encourages further development and creativity by giving the developer a source of income. A central anti-copyright argument is that copyright has never been of net benefit to society and instead serves to enrich a few at the expense of creativity.

Or as Brian Martin puts it: "Intellectual work is inevitably a collective process. No one has totally original ideas: ideas are always built on the earlier contributions of others. Intellectual property is theft, sometimes in part from an individual creator but always from society as a whole."

The alternative to intellectual property is straightforward: intellectual products should not be owned, as in the case of everyday language. That means not owned by individuals, corporations, governments, or the community as common property. It means that ideas are available to be used by anyone who wants to. Strategies against intellectual property include civil disobedience, promotion of non-owned information, and fostering of a more cooperative society. Challenging intellectual property must involve the development of methods to support creative individuals.

Strategies for change

• Change thinking. Rather than talk of intellectual property in terms of property and trade, it should be talked about in terms of free speech and its impediments. Once intellectual property is undermined in the minds of many citizens, it will become far easier to topple its institutional supports.
• Expose the costs. It can cost a lot to set up and operate a system of intellectual property. For instance, a middle-ranking country from the First World, such as Australia, pays far more for intellectual property - mostly to the US - than it receives. Once the figures are available and understood, this will aid in reducing the legitimacy of the world intellectual property system.
• Reproduce protected works. From the point of view of intellectual property, this is called "piracy". This happens every day when people photocopy copyrighted articles, tape copyrighted music, or duplicate copyrighted software. Unfortunately, illegal copying is not a very good strategy against intellectual property, any more than stealing goods is a way to challenge ownership of physical property.
• Openly refuse to cooperate with intellectual property. This is far more powerful than illicit copying. The methods of nonviolent action can be used here, including noncooperation, boycotts and setting up alternative institutions. By being open about the challenge, there is a much greater chance of focussing attention on the issues at stake and creating a dialogue. Once mass civil disobedience to intellectual property laws occurs, it will be impossible to stop.
• Promote non-owned information. A good example is public domain software, which is computer software that is made available free to anyone who wants it. A suitable alternative to copyright is shareright. A piece of freeware might be accompanied by the notice, "You may reproduce this material if your recipients may also reproduce it." Another approach, called copyleft, requires those who pass on a free program to include the rights to use, modify, and redistribute the code; the code and the freedoms become legally inseparable. The developers of "freeware" gain satisfaction out of their intellectual work and out of providing a service to others.
• Develop principles to deal with credit for intellectual work. In a more cooperative society, credit for ideas would not be such a contentious matter. In a society with less hierarchy and greater equality, intrinsic motivation and satisfaction would be the main returns from contributing to intellectual developments. The less there is to gain from credit for ideas, the more likely people are to share ideas rather than worry about who deserves credit for them. Nonetheless, principles to deal with credit for intellectual work remain important even if credit is not rewarded financially. This includes guidelines for not misrepresenting another person's work.

Analyzing the proposed stategies for change, what seems right and what seems wrong?

Pros

As someone who has published a book, I'm personally against the strategy of reproducing protected works. Any illicit violation should not be tolerated, which doesn't mean that the authors of some creative work wouldn't be willing to share their intellectual property if kindly asked. We cannot expect people whose only income relies on books they write, photographs they take or programs they create to always share their work without any cost, or to gain satisfaction only out of providing a free service to others, which other times might freely be the case. Sometimes we do produce works purely for personal satisfaction, or even for respect and recognition from peers. Other times, we kindly share part of our creative work for free, and by doing that, still contribute to the humanly need to share or, from a cultural perspective, to mash-up culture and knowledge in search of enrichment. An example of how partial sharing might be useful is the business model of Google Books, which displays millions of pages of copyrighted and uncopyrighted books as part of a business plan drawing its revenue from advertising. At the same time, Google Books blocks-out large sections of those same books, which incentivizes purchases, and supports the legitimate interests of rights holders.

Copyright is meant to protect creators. New innovations are often both creatively and expensive endeavors. The creation of copyright laws has protected innovators from investing huge amounts of time and money into a project, only to have it stolen. The establishment of the copyright laws has also led to more creators documenting their innovations. Prior to copyright laws, individuals were extra secretive, sometimes choosing not to document the innovation for fear of the idea being stolen.

Cons

While offering advantages, such as protecting creators, copyright laws also have some disadvantages, like creating monopolies. The right to monopolize the sale of the product or its reproduction puts a lot of power in the hands of one person or company. Monopolies over items, like prescription drugs, means that companies can charge any amount they desire, making the medicine too expensive for lower socioeconomic families or individuals to afford. Unfortunately, copyright laws most often benefit large corporations and businesses, rather than individuals. Instead of helping the public with innovations, they become a costly burden that can only be accessed by the wealthy. Companies also rely on outdated patents to generate income rather than creating new, more efficient innovations. This is where the mass civil disobedience to intellectual property laws might help. By cooperatively and solidly showing the discontent, there is indeed a greate chance of focussing attention on the issues at stake and creating a dialogue with the copyright holders.

In the context of the Internet and Web 2.0 it is quite obvious that copyright law needs to be adapted to modern information technology. Copyright has become obsolete with regards to the Internet, the cost of trying to enforce it is unreasonable, and instead business models need to adapt to the reality of the darknet (a phrase used to refer collectively to all covert communication networks). Many citizens of the Internet want to share their work - and the power to reuse, modify, and distribute their work - with others on generous terms. This is particularly so in the context of Web 2.0 and the increase in user generated content. However, it is also true that many of the Web 2.0 users often do not realise that they are inadvertently engaging in copyright infringements (the most common case, quite actual for us as new media students, is blogging and the associated passing around of articles and images). Yet, we all have become to love the free and open source software and want the collaborative creation to continue, which programs us to support the strategy of promoting non-owned information.

To conclude

In one way or another, if intellectual property is to be challenged, people need to be reassured that misappropriation of ideas will not become a big problem. Creative society still needs some sort of laws, but perhaps they should be less constricting, such as the above mentioned shareright and copyleft alternatives. Creative Commons, a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share, also states that it is not anti-copyright per se, but argues for copyright to be managed in a more flexible and open way.

Current copyright system needs to be brought into line with reality and the needs of society. Hipatia argues that this would "provide the ethical principles which allow the individual to spread his/her knowledge, to help him/herself, to help his/her community and the whole world, with the aim of making society ever more free, more equal, more sustainable, and with greater solidarity." As pointed out by Martin in the article, "in a society with less hierarchy and greater equality, intrinsic motivation and satisfaction would be the main returns from contributing to intellectual developments."

Cory Doctorow and Boing Boing


Cory Doctorow, a Canadian blogger, journalist and science fiction author as well as an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organisation, believes that copyright laws should be liberalized to allow for free sharing of all digital media. He has also advocated filesharing. He argues that copyright holders should have a monopoly on selling their own digital media, and copyright laws should only come into play when someone attempts to sell a product currently under someone else's copyright. Doctorow is an opponent of digital rights management (DRM), claiming that it limits the free sharing of digital media and frequently causes problems for legitimate users (including registration problems that lock users out of their own purchases and prevent them from being able to move their media to other devices and platforms).


Boing Boing is a publishing entity, first established as a magazine, later becoming a group blog (co-edited by Cory Doctorow). Boing Boing became a website in 1995 and later relaunched as a weblog on January 21, 2000, described as a "directory of wonderful things." The site's own original content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license, as of August 2008.

Topic 14: The History and Development of Copyright

No task here this week.