Branko’s Weblog

Want to change copyright? Here’s your chance!

The European Commission has, er, pardon the pun, commissioned a report on how the different copyright directives in the E.U. can be aligned so that the rules can be further harmonized.

Harmonization, that is: true harmonization, would be good news for Project Gutenberg, of which I am a volunteer. For a while now, a group of volunteers has been contemplating a Dutch or even a E.U. Project Gutenberg.

However, as it is, even with a much more clear-cut copyright regime, the American Project Gutenberg gets threatened with law-suits often enough. The morass of European copyright laws is a much larger threat for a European Project Gutenberg.

If you want to comment on the Commission’s proposals for harmonization, you can do so before October 31.

All interested parties are invited to do so.

“What!”, you cry, “that means I have only got two days.”

Well, that is true. But if something is hindering you in the current E.U. copyright regime, two days should be sufficient to write that down. Remember, those civil servants are excellent at comparing stuffy rules to spot what’s wrong with them on a theoretical level, but they can very well use your real-word examples to back them up.

For instance, I love text adventures. Most text adventures, even though perhaps dozens (if not hundreds) still get created every year, are abandoned. They are games from the heyday of adventuring, and their copyright holders are often hard to find, and finding them does not always guarantee that you will be allowed to play or distribute their games. (My experience is that this is mainly because the rights holders do not want the hassle!)

These games were an important factor in my growing up, yet they are disappearing from this world at an alarming rate. If there had not been thousands of people willing to infringe copyrights, most of these games might not even exist anymore.

So this is what I am going to write the commission: that there should be a system to deal with abandoned works. That letting libraries and/or museums take care of this has proven inefficient, because they are slow to respond to new types of works. That stowing away works in stuffy museums is not going to help; in order to relive them, we should be able to replay them.

My note is going to be a bit longer, but mostly along those lines.

He seems to be one of the few who think that copyright as it is, is quite all right and need not be changed: Minister of Justice Piet Hein Donner (christian conservatives) recently wrote a letter to Dutch parliament (Dutch PDF) saying as much.

However, he did note a favourable change in the copyright landscape. About Creative Commons he wrote:

“Tegen deze achtergrond verwelkom ik uiteraard initiatieven zoals Creative Commons, waarmee de verspreiding van auteursrechtelijk beschermde werken via Internet op basis van een stelsel van standaardlicenties wordt gestimuleerd zonder dat inbreuk op het auteursrecht wordt gemaakt (vgl. www.creativecommons.nl).”

(Against this background [that of free access to information--Branko] I welcome intiatives like that of Creative Commons, with which distribution of copyrighted works via internet on the basis of a set of standard licenses is being encouraged without infringing on copyrights (cp. www.creativecommons.nl).)

Actually, he wrote ‘copyright protected works’, but I am not going to follow him in that use of entertainment industry propaganda jargon: works are rarely protected by copyright, and commonly destroyed by it.

The streams of the recently held copyright symposium at the Berlage Exchange are now available, unfortunately only in Windows Media format. The videos are distributed using the Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial Creative Commons license, which may mean that subtitles are Verboten!

Called up a company that wanted to sell me something. Got a message: “Het nummer is bezet. U kunt gratis de vijf toetsen.” (This number is busy. You can press the five for free.)

I did not dare press any of the other keys on my phone.

I managed to acquire a ticket for the Bits of Freedom/XS4All organized symposium on Alternatives to Copyright after all.

The two main alternatives named were levies, which already exist in the Netherlands, and DRM, which is more or less the road the E.U. wants to take.

The day was closed with a debate among four parliamentarians. They started their debate in true political style, by using a lot of words to say exactly nothing.

However, Erik Huizer, part-time professor of Internet Applications and director of many things at NOB, lead the debate skillfully, and whether it was because of him or because the politicians were willing to speak out, the more remarkable statements of the day came from this part of the symposium:

- State Secretary Piet Hein Donner does not much feel like discussing the future of copyright. According to a letter published two days before the symposium, he feels things can stay pretty much the same as they are now. The debaters unanimously disagreed with him, and especially Donner’s fellow party member Nicolien Vroonhoven was adamant that the government and parliament should go ahead as agreed before, and study what changes need to be made to copyright in the digital era.

- The two members of right wing parties felt that less weight should be given to privacy in light of DRM systems: “Consumers are not defenseless; they are capable of making their own choices.” The left, however, was doubtful; in reality, Kees Vendrik of the Green Party posited, the consumer’s freedom to engage in a DRM enforced contract with huge corporations is a lopsided affair.

It was of course the opening speaker of the day, Christiaan Alberdingk Thijm, who succesfully invoked a consumer’s right to privacy when winning court cases for Kazaa and Zoekmp3.

- Finally, surprisingly all four parliamentarians present felt that television programmes that have been paid for out of public funds should be more or less copyright free. The members of parliament promised to ask the government to make this happen.

Links and sources: Dutch parliamentarians favour releasing public broadcast images into public domain (Digital Media Europe, English), Privacy belangrijk? Dan maar geen internet (Webwereld, Dutch), Symposium ‘Alternatieve modellen voor auteursrecht’ (Tweakers.net, Dutch).

First let me point you to a very thoughtful essay by Cory Doctorow on the evils of DRM. (It’s called “Microsoft Research DRM talk”; in case the link is broken, you can probably find it elsewhere.)

When copyfighters hear about DRM, they are supposed to start foaming at the mouth, as a sort of pavlovian reaction to the evils of Big Copyright. At least, I started to foam at the mouth whenever I heard the word DRM.

Then, I was asked to join an effort to protest DRM with the European Commission, and to help write a piece from the point of view of Project Gutenberg on DRM. Perhaps if I had remembered Cory’s talk, I would have had enough amunition to crank out a good text. Problem is, I had forgotten all about it, and had to come up with my own arguments.

What I found out is that I do not have any real arguments against DRM. Sure, it will enable others to write their own private copyright laws, but nobody is forced to buy their works in the first place. As a matter of fact, works that aren’t encumbered by DRM are likely to do better in the market, because they are more usable. Would you buy a car that refuses to drive into certain streets? Would you buy bread that you are only permitted to eat between 12 and 14 o’clock?

But the thing that struck me the most, is that DRM is both the result of what we asked of Big Copyright, and the result of what we presented as the right way.

What we asked of Big Copyright: that they take technological instead of legal measures to lock up their content. Hence, DRM.

What we showed Big Copyright as the Right Way: that if an application has sufficient non-evil purposes (cp. the Betamax case), that application by itself cannot be deemed evil. Hence, DRM.

(And so the truly evil thing is laws that prevent one from breaking or circumventing DRM locks. Laws that make that illegal should be struck down as soon as possible.)

The volatile nature of blog entries makes me cringe. I am someone who gets physically ill if he has to throw stuff out. “But it is still useful!”, I cry, while friends pry useless crap from my hands.

Because most bloggers live for the day, their archives (one wonders why they even have such things) are marvels of bad usability. And not just their archives. Seriously, I have seen web usability experts wander into blogs with a lamp on their helmet, and supplies worth two weeks of food and water, only never again to come out.

Still, the mere existence of blog archives (and the fact that some blogs allow for categorizing, which is only really handy if you want to look for older entries and limit your search) would seem to suggest that I am not the only one who has trouble to let go.

(Yes, I know the software behind the page that you are currently reading is crap too; there is little I can do about it do, as I am using a free blog hosting service.)

Update (7-1-2006): when I refer to “this blog”, I refer to my old web-log.nl blog. In the meantime I have moved to a self-hosted WordPress blog, which naturally has its own set of usability problems, different from web-log.nl’s.

Leon Krijnen of daily BN/De Stem gets all grandfatherly and talks about the good old days (Dutch), when the internet was young, the air was clean and sex was dirty. (Well, perhaps not the two latter things but … ah well, you get the point.)

He recounts how “Every Saturday morning, round about 9 A.M., the web server went down. Only after about five weeks the cause of this was discovered. The hardware had been put in the cellar of a media castle in Sittard, where the cleaning lady pulled the plug every weekend to be able to put in the plug of the vacuum cleaner. When she had finished vacuuming, she would neatly put the web server’s power plug back in, and by the time the alarmed system administrator had arrived, she had long left the premises. The logs of the server would fail to reveal any hint as to the cause of these mysterious outages, because even Linux is incapable of doing much logging when all electricity is gone.”

(Via R-Win.)

Sears, what I presume to be the Bijenkorf of the US, used to sell pre-fab houses for around two-thousand dollar from the 1900s through the 1940s. You would get your IKEA-type catalog, pick a house, order it, and all the materials would be delivered to what would at one point in time become your door.

With the inflated prices for building or buying a house in the Netherlands, such a scheme would probably work here too.

“They say that all that’s required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. If only it were that easy. I spent October eating nachos and playing Kingdom Of Loathing in my duvet, yet still no sign of several-headed whores of Babylon waving triumphantly from Buckingham Palace’s balcony. Evil must try harder.”

Thus begins Dany o’Brian’s column To Evil! of September. To Evil! is a monthly column in which the author tries to find the evilest IT personality of the past month. Foony Stoof!