8
May
I had a sentiment lately, that was very disturbing to me, and which I haven’t had ever before in my life, in any circustance: There are things I can’t say. More precisely, there are things I can’t say, but want to say.1 According to yet another of Paul Graham’s essays, that’s actually a healthy thing.
The thing I couldn’t say so far is: Copyrights are abused, and they are abused on a big scale, and they are abused by the copyright holders. Neither of these points is new. What is new to me, is that it became mainstream to think they are wrong. What was once the rhetoric of the media industry found its way somehow into the mindset of Joe Ordinary and Jane Doe, even though they never created anything and are not affected by it at all.
I don’t even know where to start. There’s so many fronts2 this issue is being fought that it seems to be impossible to approach it from there. At the core lies the question about what copyright is, and this question is split in two separate entities: What is a copy, and what’s your rights.
Copyright is related to works. Basically, everyone creating something is holding the copyright for this work. It’s automatic, and there’s nothing that needs to be done for it to take effect. Copyright was designed to protect the creators and give them the right to be compensated for the works they did. This – general – description of copyright is true about most western nations, though national variations apply.
As with every right, there are boundaries. Time is one of them. Copyright does not stand indifinitely, but – again, in most western nations – ends 70 years after the death of the copyright holder. At this point, the work is considered a commons, meaning that everyone can use it for any purpose. However, people redistributing it, will not hold copyright over this work themselves. Once, a work is falling into the public domain, it will stay there forever.
Another boundary is the right of users. While creators retain most of the rights of their works, the public, and the people who paid for their works, attain certain rights over these, too. One of the most important ones is the ‘fair use’ doctrine, which exists in several, sometimes drastic, variations in most western nations. Fair use means that not all uses of the work can be controlled by the copyright holder. Quotes being a popular example. You can quote from a work without asking for permission. Satire is another. Of course, it is possible to caricature someone or a work without asking for permission (otherwise, all satire would be made impossible). And a third, and mostly neglected one, is personal use. As an individual, I can use works I purchased for personal purposes without asking for permission.
As clean and easy these rules may sound, they get incredibly complicated, because ‘works’ are no singular entities. Today, more than ever, works are composed out of several things, some of which are already copyrighted by other people. Take Machinima, for example. You can make a movie using 3D models or virtual worlds. The people and surroundings in this video will be made by a multitude of people. Basically, all these works are protected, and the use of them is restricted by copyright. The same applies to most of the things created in Second Life. To make a truly unique item, you’d have to make all the textures, all the prims, all the scripts in it, and all the sounds yourself. While some people do that, most do not.
That’s where open content is coming in. Open content are works which are made available by the creators themselves for reuse under certain restrictions. The most widely know and popular base for this are creative commons, others are software specific, like the GPL and BSD licenses. These are methods for creators to state up front what can be done with their creations without the user having to ask for permission.
This is our legal frame. We all, however, break it. We all browse the web, download pictures and songs and files without thinking much about these issues. As long as we use them privately, that was not much of a problem for us. However, on the net, many people stop being private, and become publishers. It’s the nature of the internet not only to be consumed, but to be participated in. The same applies to Second Life.
Here’s where the hysteria starts. Suddenly, when it’s our creations, and we think we have some rights to them, the game has changed. Other users wanting to use them, even under perfectly legal terms, are frowned upon. If you do not believe that, grab yourself a copybot and go copy AM Radio’s “The Far Away”, which is released under a Creative Commons License. In fact, grab your self a copybot and try going anywhere public, preferably to a mall.
But what are these copybots doing differently from what an internet browser has been doing for decades? They display the full range of the 3D web, just as any browser worth the name displays the full range of the 2D web. Is there really an initiative to stop Internet Explorer from saving pictures? Or from removing the copy/paste ability out of operating systems, because it allows for the illicit copying of text?
When you browse the web, you get the whole web. You even get the source code of websites you visit. When you buy software, you get the whole software. Same with music, same with books. That’s how it was up until now. Now, everyone is a creator. And of course, as there are many more creators now, the value of creations is shrinking. The once controlled ways of distribution are getting dissolved, and creations merge and mold in chaotic ways. The ability to hold control over your creations, the way it is envisioned by copyright, is getting more and more impossible. Consequently, the craving to retain that control is getting stronger. So now, we spend our time not only creating, but also to a good extent on protecting our creations.
Why is that bad? Firstly, because it’s hypocritical. Nobody who ever copied anything should complain about people copying their creations. And if you keep in mind that recording a TV show is an illicit copy, or making a photocopy of a newspaper article is an illicit copy, or even singing someone else’s song in public, or playing it to others, is an illicit copy, I think it’s a safe bet to say that most, if not all creators are copyright infringers to begin with.
Secondly, because the ends do not justify the means. In order to control copyright, the current solution is nothing short of an all-encompassing surveillance system. Only with a supervision of the channels of distribution will it be possible to detect copyright abuses. This has led to numerous calls for controlling and monitoring internet traffic. Of course, it also leads to calls for surveillance of Second Life users.3
And thirdly, who will benefit from this? Will it really be the content creators? Or is it the people who grab for more power over the lives of citizens that will benefit the most? Is it, maybe, not about you and your creations at all, but about people using the copyright system as a means for their own ends? Could it be, that it’s actually not just about copyright, but also about preventing you from saying what you think?
To me, at least, that is what it started to feel like.
- I know there are a lot of things I can’t say but which I am very happy to just keep for myself and in the back of my mind. [↩]
- The CDS system, the copybot issues, the third party viewer policy and the new Terms Of Service, to name just some that are related to Second Life [↩]
- There would be many many things to add to this particular issue, but I don’t want to distract from the main topic and thus keep them for myself. [↩]
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