Interesting People mailing list archives
IP: Re: copyright vs. technology
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Tue, 29 May 2001 20:45:37 -0400
Date: 29 May 2001 20:05:43 -0400 From: "John R Levine" <johnl () iecc com> To: "Dave Farber" <farber () cis upenn edu>Protection via lawyers means that each and every transaction is risky, problematic, and costly, but most of all that the protection is only available to those with large legal staffs.Protecting via technology extends the protection to both large players and ordinary folk. Joe Sixkpack can publish digital property by combining his own content with other objects purchased from others, with the ensemble protected via technology instead of copyright law, courts and lawyers.Maybe I'm biased from having sold a lot of books and gotten paid via contracts negotiated under copyright law, but I don't think this viewpoint stands up under analysis. First, you don't need a large legal staff to use copyright effectively. Assuming you register your copyrights, the statutory penalties for violations are large enough that lawyers will take a case on contingency, i.e., without an up-front payment. Registration is easy, fill out a form and send it in with two copies of the stuff to be registered and a small filing fee. It's true, it's not cost-effective for material that isn't likely to be worth at least a few hundred dollars, but that's a feature; copyright is intended to offer the opportunity to reap significant reward for significant effort, not to lock down every two-minute hack. Second, the scheme that Cox proposes is more or less Ted Nelson's Xanadu model. It depends on a global micropayments system, which doesn't exist despite years of effort by smart people, with no likelihood I can see of becoming real. Lacking micropayments, you sell material in large chunks for amounts of money large enough to be worth clearing through existing payment systems. Content distribution systems like that already exist, of course. We call them "book stores". Third, a micropayments scheme depends just as much on laws and lawyers as copyright does. Were a micropayments scheme to exist, it would have all the bugs and hacking problems of any other banking system, needing a legal framework just like any other banking system. (How does someone in Tunisia remit 0.13 cents to you? If his payment bounces or turns out to be counterfeit, what recourse do you have? Conversely, when someone in Tunisia bills you 0.13 cents for something you didn't read, how do you challenge the charge?) And finally, the "technical" scheme also depends on laws and lawyers. Any sort of copy protection will be broken somehow if the material it protects is valuable enough. Maybe someone will find bugs in the crypto code, maybe they'll just circumvent it by OCR'ing screen images, but they'll do it somehow, and then what? The legal system has evolved to "fail soft" with police and courts to handle the cases where people don't obey the laws and appeals courts and legislatures to handle the cases where the result from the court is wrong. But once the content escapes from the dongleware, then what? Well, I suppose you could sue. Copyright is a legally-brokered deal between authors and readers that has worked well for over 250 years. I am certainly no fan of gross overreaches like the 95 year copyright term and the reverse engineering prohibitions in the DMCA, nor do I have much sympathy for people who demand iron-clad intellectual property protection for every two-sentence document or twelve-line program. But copyright's deal of a limited copying monopoly for a limited time independent of the underlying technology has a lot to recommend it, and it's extremely premature to panic and give up on it merely because of a few years of rapid technological change that haven't yet shaken out. Regards, John Levine, johnl () iecc com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://iecc.com/johnl, Sewer Commissioner Finger for PGP key, f'print = 3A 5B D0 3F D9 A0 6A A4 2D AC 1E 9E A6 36 A3 47
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- IP: Re: copyright vs. technology David Farber (May 29)