Branko's Weblog

Well, not alive live…

Across from the place on the Ferdinand Bolstraat where they sell belts there is a place where they will punch holes in belts, and I am guessing they are sort of ashamed of charging money for such a simple activity, so they don’t.

Recently they put a tip jar on the counter. I had heard of such things, but oddly enough never seen one in action. (Recently in the previous sentence means: since I last needed holes punched.)

H. Piper Beam’s science fiction novel Little Fuzzy has been ‘rebooted’ by John Scalzi (see here and here). Scalzi is still shopping for a publisher for Fuzzy Nation, as his novel is called. It is not entirely clear what the difference is between a reboot and a re-imagination.

I read Little Fuzzy a couple of years ago and wasn’t much impressed. The novel does seem to be a favourite for a lot of science fiction fans. Its story revolves largely about an arcane legal point, namely “When does a species qualify as sapient enough to not have its planet colonized?”

For me this news is interesting because it shows the sort of creativity that we could see a lot more of if current copyright laws weren’t so insanely long lasting and far reaching. Piper Beam committed suicide in 1964, and never got around to renewing copyrights on a number of his works, including the original Little Fuzzy novel.

Although Scalzi did not have to do so, he still asked permission to publish his book from ‘the Piper estate’ (presumable publisher Ace). Tim Wu once discussed reasons one might have for such a strategy. Scalzi himself says: “Being able to say «no, there are no possible legal land mines around this novel» is worth being able to say to an interested publisher.”

See also at Teleread:

• From Project Gutenberg e-text to PDF-based e-book for your Iliad (using Little Fuzzy as an example)
• Recent English sci-fi at Project Gutenberg

In offices you have this thankless job called super user—not to be confused with the UNIX role of the same name. A super user, sometimes called ‘power user,’ is a person who is not part of the IT department but who does menial IT-related tasks such as fixing broken printers, explaining colleagues how to bold text in a word processor, and so on. He, usually a he, is the colleague who knows a bit about computers. The IT department are grateful for his existence, because he is their first line of defence against really dumb questions. He is the chap who checks that the printer is on when other users complain it is broken.

Although not every field has a name for the type of person who sits between the laymen and the experts, most fields do have them. The problem with the super user is that unlike the layman and the expert, he is never right.

You can see how this works by looking at a simpler realm, that of time-telling. There are broken watches, regular watches, and high-precision watches. The third category always tells the right time, the first tells you the right time twice a day, and the second category, the super user watch, never tells the right time because it is always a bit off. That is to say, the regular watch knows enough about time that it can take a pretty good guess at what time it is, but it almost never tells the time precisely. If it did with any regularity, it would be an ‘expert.’

In the law business you can see this principle at work too. People who know nothing about the law still have opinions about it. And since these people are the customers of the law’s salesmen (lawyers, judges), they tend to be right about the law once in a while. The lawyers and judges are the legal experts. They tend to be right a lot. But the person who has made it a point to get to know the law a bit almost always guesses wrong about where the law stands.

I am afraid that is the point where I am right now with regards to copyright law. I can see the point of the laymen, and I can see the knowledge of the experts, and all I can hope at the moment is that I can have some kind of useful role in bringing the two together, because this law is broken.

Just me brainstorming.

Authors should be obliged to exploit their works. When they don’t do that for a set period of time—ten years tops sounds reasonable—their copyrights should be transferred to an entity that will exploit it for them. Authors of works that are only fixed in rapidly decaying media, such as anything digital (where not only the physical medium but also and especially the software environment deteriorate) should be obliged to keep their works ‘executable,’ as IT types call it. It should be possible in ten years time to still disseminate the digital works. Publishers will have the obligation to keep digital works accessible for at least the duration of copyright. Failure to do so should result in huge fines that reflect not only the damage to buyers, but also to society as a whole.

Here’s the problem set. Many works linger unexploited. Copyright law says nobody can touch these works, even though they have been injected into the public consciousness at some point in time, and have shaped public discourse. It should be possible to disseminate these works more easily than is currently possible. It is estimated that so-called orphan works form between 75 and 90 % of all works in most jurisdictions.

Current economic theory, especially a very little (and badly) understood theory called The Long Tail, holds that if all works are made readily accessible, all works will be consumed. Popular works, which typically have a monopoly on shelf space, will each still be consumed much, much more often than individual unpopular works made accessible, but since unpopular works outnumber popular works by quite a large degree, the consumption of all works should about double. This is good for everyone.

This should be written into law and the law should be applied retroactively.

What do you think? What would the objections against such a law be? Are there advantages I missed? Am I overestimating the size of the problem space? Perhaps publishers will wise up, and will have made their entire back catalog accessible in ten years, and we’ll all be laughing at my worries.

I have no del.icio.us account, so I am dumping this stuff here. Nothing to see, move along.

NVJ trying to stretch the contours of traditional copyright in the consumer sphere: here and here. The only earlier case I know of where consumers got prosecuted or sued over copyright infringement was in the case of a couple of search engines (either mp3s or torrents) where Dutch brownshirts BREIN managed to get a subsidiary of customs involved. I’ll update when I remember.

Some extra-gratis context for this discussion here.

BBC talks about a study that shows how only popular acts get pirated. Even though I like the conclusion, the study seems to have a number of methodological shortcomings. Unfortunately the BBC doesn’t link to the study, so I have no idea what the actual conclusions of the study were. Perhaps BBC just misquoted.

Although my posting frequency here never has been a thing to brag about much, lately it has dropped below the “once a week” that I unconsciously saw as a minimum. This is not because of the dreaded blogging fatigue, but because I’ve joined a couple of other blogs—which I must have written about once or twice before, so let this be just a gentle reminder.

Most of my time goes to 24 Oranges, weird and wonderful news about the Netherlands (English). (Or: just my postings.)

I used to post about twice a week at the Teleread blog, but since 2007 my Teleread posting frequency has also suffered. At first that was because of lots of paid work, but when I had more time later it went to 24 Oranges. (Or: just my postings.)

Finally, the past few weeks I have had four guest blogs up at the Iusmentis blog, which is Arnoud Engelfriet’s blog about the meeting of technology and law. Writing mainly about copyright and Project Gutenberg, I have posted the following items there (in Dutch):

• Auteursrecht tot ruim 200 jaar na creatie
• Niet-bestaande auteursrechten, deel 1
• Niet-bestaande auteursrechten, deel 2
• Auteursrechtenonderzoek in de praktijk

I will try and translate, and then post these four entries either here or at Teleread, when I have the time. I put a lot of research into these postings, so it would be a pity to limit them to speakers of Dutch. Also, the readers of the Iusmentis blog have added some valuable comments that could use a larger audience.

The British-Dutch mega-publisher Reed Elsevier spent more than 3 million dollars in bribes lobbying fees in the US last year. What the publisher hopes to get back for this money? It probably won’t be a more balanced and more honest form of copyright. The US politicians that were bolstered by this “support” have been bullying most of the rest of the world into accepting always stronger and more bizarre forms of copyright. Those countries unwilling to participate are threatened with economic sanctions.

On January 1 of this year ‘t was more than 70 years ago that son of Elsevier founder Jacob G. Robbers died. In our current climate copyrights last insanely long, but not for ever. To be precise, in the Netherlands copyrights last until 70 full calendar years after the death of the author. On January 1 of this year I uploaded Herman Robbers’ De Vreemde Plant (The Strange Plant) to The Internet Archive. Please consider that a tiny remuneration from Elsevier for whatever copyright hell it’s going to loose on Dutch citizens.

(Lobbying story via Teleread.)

I’ve been plagiarized! Yes, I know. What happened is that Expactica, a website for expats…

Wait, I first have to explain to you what expats are, in case you need to have this explained to you. Expats are people that move to another country. But they are not emigrants. As the name implies, they frame their new position in terms of the original country; the name they give themselves is openly hostile to the new culture. Why would the Dutch put up with such people? Well, I don’t know. “Emigrants” are from all walks of life, and continuously get heaps of shit poured down their collars for not “integrating” fast enough. “Expats” on the other hand are actually hostile to the Netherlands, get nothing but praise, and are usually white Anglo-Saxon butt-corkers.

Oops! I almost suggested that racism comes into play here, though of course as everybody knows there is no racism in the Netherlands. Look at Geert Wilders — not directly, you’ll go blind. As once Andrew Rilstone so eloquently put in between his regular bouts of nut-job Christianism, where I can no longer find it, condemning religions is just a way of being a racist without going to jail for it. Muslims are brown people. You want to slag off brown people? Slag off Islam. But racism is a form of extremism, and if you claim that Dutch politician Wilders, the most vocal critic of Islam in the Netherlands, is an extremist, you go to jail. Ipso facto, there is no racism in the Netherlands.

So where were we? Ah yes, plagiarism. I co-blog at 24 Oranges, a site that provides news about the Netherlands in English. So does the excellent Dutchnews.nl, and so does Expatica.com. A moderator at the Expatica forums copied one of my articles wholesale (link to original, link to copy). That’s copyright infringement, that is. But I don’t care so much about that. Obviously the person who copied it liked my article enough to copy it, and to copy it verbatim at that. And it’s only free publicity for me, right? Wrong.

For some reason, my name did not appear in the copy. If you look closely though, you’ll see what appears to be an honest mistake. There is a source statement, but it accidentally links to a third party that has nothing to do with publishing the story. The Expatica moderator obviously wasn’t trying to get credit for something she had not written. She merely misattributed the story.

A friend said about plagiarism: “Why worry about this instance? You could be plagiarized a thousand times without ever finding out about it.” But I did find out about it, and this is my worry: that people who discover both stories (which is not hard, as accidentally Googling for a phrase unique to my story will show you both) may think that I am the plagiarist. It’s not so much that I must be known as the original author, but rather that I could do without a bad reputation. People don’t look further than the web; what evidence can I present that I am the original author? What happens if further websites plagiarize me: would that be only further evidence that I am a plagiarist? (”Look, he stole from more than one website.”)

So I wrote to Expactica, and asked them to put things right. Guys, I sort of wrote, please correct the source statement. And now we’re more than a week further, and no response. Not even a nyeh nyeh, we’re not going to do it. I know they got my message, because I used their online form (the only way to get into contact with them).

The next step would be to take legal action. First, an official DMCA like complaint, either to Expatica themselves or to their upstream host. Then, a lawsuit. And you know what? That’s just too much work, and a little bit in just too expensive. The courts in this country will only give you real damages, and not even that. So, a couple of hundreds euros and lots of lost time in, and all I would have gotten was lousy justice. So I won’t take further action, and just hope my reputation will remain unscathed. (I rather guess it will.)

What have we learned here:

• Expatica.com may not be the most reliable of parties. Don’t buy their stuff! Boo! Hiss!
• I can easily go off the main track for rants that have little to do with the matter at hand.
• I have too much time on my hands.
• Any or none of the above.

Donna Wentworth had an interesting opinion about plagiarism that may be more robust in these networked times than just “it’s bad.”

I am getting lazier every day; I have done absolutely nothing to find the answer to the following question (the sixth in a series) myself.

6. Can there be a copyright on a text adventure walkthrough?

(And: who owns this walkthrough?)

First, some definitions. A text adventure is a type of video game. Specifically, it is a type that is known as an adventure game: you replay a story that the programmer has come up with. You give the computer instructions, and in response the story unfolds. Typically, the instructions you give aid in the solving of puzzles. For instance, the computer has just told or shown you that you are in a room with a locked door, and in order to get on with the game you need to figure out how to unlock the door. Maybe there’s a key in the plant pot?

Text adventures are adventures in which these instructions are given by typing in English commands at a prompt. Typically the dialogue between the player and the computer goes as follows:

COMPUTER: You are in a room with a door to the North. There is a plant pot here.

PLAYER: OPEN DOOR

COMPUTER: The door is locked.

PLAYER: UNLOCK DOOR

COMPUTER: With what?

PLAYER: KEY

COMPUTER: You don't have the key.

PLAYER: SEARCH POT

COMPUTER: What do you know? Somebody has left a key here! (Transfering key to player)

PLAYER: UNLOCK DOOR WITH KEY THEN OPEN DOOR

COMPUTER: The door is now open.

As you can see, the language employed by the player is pretty terse. This is partially to save time, but also partially because the so-called parsers that text adventure programmers use to “understand” the player, regardless of how rich and complex they are, still only cover a tiny sub-set of all possible English sentences, even if you limit this sub-set to one that is useful for the game at hand.

Now, a definition of the term walkthrough: a list of commands (in order) needed to solve the entire game.

Finally, you may need to know that there are linear and non-linear games: the former allow for only one possible path through the puzzle tree. Non-linear games on the other hand can be solved in different ways. (To return to the example: perhaps you can break the door open with a crow bar that just happened to be in your knap-sack.)

The above, by the way, is not a hypothetical question. If you strip away everything but the domain name in the URL of this entry, and press Enter, you will soon find yourself at a website that publishes walkthroughs for text adventures. If I were to find walkthroughs on the web without a license, would I be allowed to publish them here? And what if I found one with a license; would I be able to get the ‘author’ prosecuted for copyfraud?

Earlier questions

1. Why does a work published after the death of an author receive a copyright? (answer)
2. How can SNTE (the firm that maintains and exploits the Eiffel tower) claim a copyright on the image of the illuminated Eiffel tower when the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas has had a very similar lighted Eiffel tower since two years before?
3. What rights does Microsoft base it’s licenses for protocols on?
   (2+3 as yet unanswered)
4. Is it possible to create a public domain image based on copyrighted sources? (as yet unanswered)
5. Who owns the copyright on an interview; the interviewer, the interviewee, or both? (partially answered)

Copyright law is based on the wisdom that “you cannot compete with free”. If an author creates a work, and others give that work to readers for free, the author is likely to have a hard time making money with the work.

(Or so the theory goes. There are many authors who do exactly that; they give free access to their works and rely on secondary means to generate income — think rock bands that sell access to their concerts after an audience has been formed by free access to their works. But that aside.)

This informal rule describes what economists call “market failure”: the market reaches an undesirable result in the distribution of goods or services, as perceived by the public. Politicians fear that this market failure will drive potential authors away from producing creative works.

Where the free market fails to improve society, the government must intervene. For instance, in the case of a natural distaster that disrupts the distribution of goods (market failure), many governments step in and give gratis food to those who claim to need it.

This government intervention, although doing good on the whole, typically has negative side-effects. In the example of the disaster area, the government’s actions undermine the livelihoods of local producers who are just as stricken as their potential buyers, and whose chances of survival are largely dependent on there being a market in the first place. Since food is free in this situation, the local producers of food go bankrupt.

So when a government battles market-failure, it must make very sure that the negative side-effects are worth it. For instance, it is not the government’s task to ensure certain business models survive. If a local producer in a disaster area cannot compete with the free food handed out, that’s just tough luck. The government has to weigh two bads against each other, and choose the least among them. And although it would be nice of such a government to also support the local producers, for instance through the means of subsidies, it is by no means morally required to do so.

In the case of creative works, governments try to combat market failure by censorship; people and organisations other than the authors of those works are forbidden to copy those works. The right to copy belongs to the authors.

It is obvious that censorship is a bad thing, and it is only one of the many bad side-effects of copyright law. Nevertheless, most current governments feel that the potential good of copyright outweighs the very real negatives.

The reasoning behind the desire to combat market failure in the creative arena by introducing copyright law seems to be as follows:

• It is good to have works that the public can disseminate.
• In order to stimulate the creation of works, the authors should be given a chance to recoup their investments.
• In order for authors to recoup their investments, they should be able to publish their works in exchange for money/goods/services.
• At this point market failure occurs.
• In order to combat market failure, we make it illegal for the public to disseminate the works…
• … unless they have bought the authors’ permission to do so.

Another aspect of copyrights is that they often can be traded entirely. It is not uncommon in some areas of the creative world that publishers buy all or most of the copyrights, or negotiate extremely far-reaching licenses.

There is a myth surrounding copyright that say that authors deserve to earn their livelihoods with their works. Note that this is not how copyright law works. Copyrights give an author the means to try and monetize their works, but this right does not guarantee that every author will make a living of producing works; and it is definitely not the meaning behind the law to have copyrights act as a generator of social welfare. The authors get their copyrights, but they themselves have to make sure these copyrights then turn into money.

The reality is that very few authors who write for money actually earn their livelihoods through their copyrights. The reasons for this are a result of how the markets work, and are manifold and outside the scope of this article. Suffice it say that buyers also have a say in the market, and are willing to invest only a certain amount of money in the creation of works. Also, many third-parties are involved in the production of works that also need to be recompensed.

In the above the terms “author,” “reader,” “writing,” and “publisher” are used as generic terms; they may for instance also refer to composers and record labels.

SVG source file

Also read (Dutch)
- “Rapport Auteursrecht en Informatiemaatschappij | 24-02-2004″
- “Auteursrecht: economische lust of last?” (2003)