IP: Re: copyright vs. technology

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

> 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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