Re: Comments on book?

Michael Scarpitti <mscarpit[_at_]asnt.org> wrote:

>

I've just finished reading "Copyright's Highway", but Paul Goldstein (Hill & Wang, New York, 1994). It's an excellent rendition of copyright history, from Gutenburg until (the only complaint I can make) about three seconds before the Internet & WWW hit critical mass. It is *not* a legal guide to copyright, but rather provides a very substantial background to the current state of copyright, based on law, politics, economics, technology, and social pressures.

There is in-depth coverage of pre-US copyright, evolution of 19th and 20th Century US law, the distinctions between US and European copyright basis (economic incentive vs. moral rights of authors -- of which I can finally claim to have some understanding) -- best boiled down to the question: is copyright an *authors'* right or a *users'* right? There is a good discussion of international politics and the (ahem) evolution of the United States' view of foreign copyright. The issue of photocopying library journals is the subject of a long chapter focused on the Williams & Wilkins Co. vs. the United States case. The issue of private copies also gets a chapter, concentrating largely on audio and videotaping.

The book's largest failure is timing, in that its publication *just* predates the explosion of the Internet on public conciousness. As an academic, at Stanford University (the left ventrical of the heart of the Silicon Valley), Goldstein's lack of awareness of Benders-Lee's work and its implications is disappointing at best. Goldstein does discuss what he terms "the cosmic jukebox", which resembles in some ways what we've come to know as the World Wide Web, though Goldstein seems to have a more centralized model in mind.

His suggestions for copyright management approach those of Brad Cox and Superdistribution (http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/Cox/CoxWired.html) -- a model I feel won't work due to the observations that "the internet treats censorship as damage, and routes around it" (John Gilmore). Copyright's "exclusive right" is essentially censorship to all those denied the right to copy, the Internet's treatment of it is identical. As Hal Varian (http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hal/) describes in more detail:

> The Internet offers two challenges to existing copyright: the fact that
> it is trivial to copy digital works, and the fact that these works can
> be inexpensively transferred to other users.
>
> There are technologies that can address the first problem. Essentially
> they work by encrypting the content, and decrypting it only when payment
> is received. There are a variety of schemes for accomplishing this
> going under the names of cryptographic envelopes, superdistribution,
> cryptolopes, etc.
>
> The difficulty is that these technologies only solve half the problem.
> Once the content is decrypted it can still be transferred around the world
> costlessly.

[US Government Information Policy
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/policy.pdf]

He concludes

> I believe that extending existing copyright and patent law to apply
> to digital technologies can only be a stopgap measure. Law appropriate
> for the paper-based technology of the 18th century will not be
> adequate to cope with the digital technology of the 21st century.

[http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hal/pages/sciam.html]

To his credit, Goldstein realizes:

> Copyright was technology's child from the start. There was
> no need for copyright before the printing press. But as
> movable type brought literature within the reach of everyone,
> and as the preferences of a few royal, aristocratic, or simply
> wealthy patrons were supplanted by the accumulated
> emands of mass consumers, a legal mechanism was needed to
> connect consumers to authors and publishers commercially.

["Copyright's Highway", p 27]

As copyright grew from the conditions created by new technologies which allowed rapid reproduction of information, and gave rise to both the profession of writing, and the publishing industry, I suspect a new or evolving legel regime will answer the needs of a technology which allows rapid distribution of information, and the subsequent creation of new industries, and possible fading of the old.

It's not so much that I feel copyright is wrong in the way it attempts to address the "exclusive right of authors" on the internet, or that there is no moral right of authorship, but that both are simply technologically irrelevant to the much of the current needs, nature, and use of information. This is a law born of technology, it will have to adapt to it as well.

For yet another book discussing these issues, I'm very much looking forward to Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian's "Information Rules" (http://www.inforules.com/), to be published this week by Harvard Business School Press. This is an economic treatment, and appears to focus primarily on software, but it does include considerable discussion of information and intellectual property.

-- 
Karsten M. Self (kmself[_at_]ix.netcom.com)

    What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
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