Labda Hata Mimi

I just finished watching this 3:15 hour discussion at Cornell on copyright. I really think that this makes it clear we are getting somewhere.

The MPAA president spoke of creative commons very positively. He also doesn’t seem to be as much of a southern sneak as Valentini. The napster rep was relatively forward thinking, young, and open. Each of the representatives here were finding themselves with a somewhat marginalized position: the RIAA has it’s online prices being set primarily by Apple with their iPod. Napster can’t get on the iPod. The MPAA pres was trying to work with the RIAA pres. Siva and the EFF were nearly on a level field, they’re naturally not the powerful lobbyists of the other huge organizations so that’s not normal.

Cornell is interesting because they are moving on this stuff and involving their students to an extent. They have a bandwidth metering system which I might term risky. They have also adopted napster for all of their students, sure this isn’t the optimum situation but they are moving. This panel was brought by their “University Computer Policy & Law Program”. Harvard, Stanford and now Cornell seem to be moving to be leading schools in this big copyright chat which is computer policy.

The reason I felt they were moving is that they actually discussed the possibility that collective licensing might work. They brought up the classic argument: it is not capitalistic enough, but it was properly countered with the response that we already have antitrust exhemptions for the music and movie industries–they don’t abide by captialism quite like “normal” industries. It actually isn’t that far off of Napster’s scheme. $15/mo for all the music you want. The catch? DRM.

The wonderful students at Cornell did a great job of asking the right questions to run the debate. At least three of the 10(?) inquisitioners spoke about how much DRM frustrated them. The Fred of the EFF and Siva both went back to how the industry needs less stick and more carrot. But DRM allows new business models, the MPAA head notes: they can rent out movies to people digitally without streaming.

The naturally odd sense of the collective licensing system would seem to have some issues with international realtionships. We export a lot of culture, the content people note. We’d be subsidizing the rest of the world’s content! Then discussion swayed to imperialistic intellectual property policies of the US.

I have to tie this back to my post on the Harvard Cyber law dept. policy paper from back in January. It talks about the foreseeable issues which would arise if any single system were standardized upon by the government.

I’ve listened to the debates between Lessig and Valentini. They didn’t get anywhere, blind dull rhetoric was all that Valentini acknowledged. A panel is much more vibrant. If one person is going to be closed to exploration then they simply get marginalized in the debate. I think this happened most with the guy one the end, he was on an intellectual property committee in Congress as I recall until he got hired into NBC. He kept saying that people need to be educated on why P2P is wrong. Siva countered that if copyright was so simple that one could simply explain it to anyone then how come they had to go into law school and everything to understand it.

While that is a tinge hyperbolic, this is exactly what the law scholar Jessica Litman says in her book Digital Copyright which I reviewed in my IP course. Here is an excerpt of that review:

One example she uses repeatedly is the restaurant which isn’t paying royalties for their Musak. These small businesses, time after time, attempt to litigate after being caught, despite the fact that the law, which was written by the three music industries, says exactly what ASCAP et al. say it does. They ‘are always turned away with large fees. The individual commonly assumes that small time, personal copying of information is less grievous than a commercial copying, but Litman claims this is simply not true in copyright law. This points to the fact that we all have a certain mystic logic which we apply to Copyright Law which does not actually reflect the contents of Copyright Law.

She says that Copyright law is actually a set of exhemptions and compromises between the interests which were at the bargaining table when the copyright laws are made. There is no way to teach these sorts of things to “the people”. The Jukebox was born because one of the laws of the early 1900s exhempted coin operated systems from paying to distribute music. There is no logic to find, or to defend because there was never anyone who has a concious plan for copyright. (If there was he died before he could put his plan into place and the old negotiation table got reinstituted to rush the 1976 copyright law to the US.)