Repudiate Copyright Monopoly

PORTLAND, OR

By Mike Bryson
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The French Constitutional Council has rejected the law passed by both Houses of the French parliament that would for Apple to unrestrict songs sold through iTunes to be played on competitor MP3 players.¹ Loopholes in the denied law would have allowed Apple to restrict songs from MP3 player competition if the copyright holder asked. G.U.N. Editor A.B. Dada says One important fact to realize is that copyright laws are not necessary if a content creator wishes to protect their content from copying; a content creator is free to provide the content in a format readable only by a certain reproduction device and make sure the content is not easily copied. Apple was providing a service that works without copyright laws, and the French government was insecure about what they would consider a monopoly. What most consumers and governments don’t realize is that copyright is a monopoly that requires criminalization of the act where the Apple iPod restrictions is a free market protection of resources.

In proof that Intellectual Property laws give preferential treatment only to companies that can afford to defend themselves using the law, L’Oreal Cosmetics seems to have won a case using copyright laws to criminalize a competitive similiar perfume to one they make.² The perfume that Kecofa, an inexpensive perfume manufacturer, makes contains 23 of 26 ingredients and scents as the L’Oreal competitor. Because it was not a direct knock-off, patents and trademark laws did not support L’Oreal. L’Oreal realized that the copyright law is loose enough to support a perfume creation as a work of art, and in that they used the law to remove Kecofa as the Dutch Supreme Court agreed with a lower court that Kecofa had breached L’Oreal’s copyright. Kecofa will now have to hand over to the French company all profits from Female Treasure - expected to be in the tens of millions of pounds. Preferential treatment for the largest companies only?

TheGlobeandMail shows that their days are dated when they don’t realize how insignificant copyright will be in the near future. They cover an article supporting copyright laws as Kazaa is forced to pay over a hundred million US dollars to the RIAA and become a “legal” distribution medium.³ The article states that whatever the mix of benefit and injury, if copyright is to mean anything, it should be enforceable on the copyright holder’s terms. It’s good to see another Wild West renegade acknowledge that. It will be unlikely that a large company will ever become a mass distributor of anything with legal protections, but that ignores what the Internet is about; millions to billions of individuals who all can perform actions that are relatively impossible to track. As more large businesses lose the competitive war to distribute zeros and ones, more software will be released to hide the identity of a recipient of data, a sender of data and even what the data itself is. The Wild West in the U.S. led to one of the most competitive markets of choice and low prices in world history. The Wild West on the Internet will do the same, and the old cronies like The Globe and Mail will fall by the wayside. Bet on it.

The first group to try to legally maneuvar around copyright seems to be artists. Heise Online covered an article that talks of The Big Book Crime, a desire to remove copyright considerations from Amazon.com.^{< ahref="http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/76240">4} An artist group has received a stipend to create a software bot that will spider Amazon.com and acquire the text portion of books shown online. Only time will tell in how Amazon will protect against the bot, but it seems to be a realistic desire to show how unfair copyright laws are due to the massive overreaching powers they offer to large companies rather than individual artists (as originally intended).

In another showcase of powerhouses getting what they want in the legal system, Sir Cliff Richard alledgely persuaded Prime Minister Tony Blair to push to extend his copyright timeframe so he can continue to collect royalties on music he created over 50 years ago.⁵ Cliff is angered that European and US copyright offers 70 years of legal protection for created works where the U.K. only criminalizes copyright violations for 50 years. All it seems to take is a few power players and their domain is extended.

P2PNet offers an article regarding the deadline of August 4, 2006 in offering advice to Australian lawmakers on how to modify existing laws for the new information era.⁶ Article author and musician Sally Hawkins says There’s little doubt mass media corporations, record labels and movie studios will be making submissions to the AIC on the changes ‘needed’ to protect their dying business models. It’s essential that anyone on the users’ rights side also make contributions to ensure the research reflects wishes and concerns of ALL stakeholders. There is little likelihood that e-mails from individuals will make any difference, but it is important to see what large interests can do in disrespecting basic rights of an individual to perform actions they want to do, as A.B. Dada says, on the other property, with their own hands and their own tools.

Discuss this report at the repudiate copyright forum.
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Mike Bryson is the news editor of the Global Unanimocracy Network. He lives in the Portland, OR region where he works as an IT business developer and point of sale consultant. E-mail Mike with news links or comments on this report.

YouTube, one of my favorite “Web 2.0″ sites, may soon have their day in court, according to CNet.com.¹ YouTube’s is a social network that allows members to post videos to the site to share with visitors. YouTube does not preview content, so it has been accused of being a rampant violator of copyright. In the article, a journalist has filed a lawsuit against YouTube for distributing a video he took in 1992 during the Los Angeles riots — 14 years ago.

Japan is now considering extending its copyright laws to match the US — from 50 years currently to 70 years.² Copyright originally was meant to give an artist or content creator a monopoly on the distribution of art or content for a limited time, after which the content would be public domain. This attempted to strike a balance between the artist’s ability to generate income versus the public good that content has always created.

The Consumer Electronics Association is battling the MPAA and RIAA over Google’s Image search tool. The CEA says that Google has the right to redisplay images it finds, and that sites can protect themselves from the image crawling by using a simple web tool that has been around for nearly as long as the web.³ We ask Congress to stop expanding copyright law without also protecting consumer rights. The Perfect 10, XM and Cleanflicks lawsuits are so bizarre. They simply demonstrate a need to return to sanity in the copyright law. These lawsuits come at the same time the recording industry is pushing multiple pieces of legislation aimed at controlling fair use rights. The totalitarian efforts by the content industry to restrict consumer access to information, services and technology must be stopped. We oppose piracy but the content industry now wants to use the claim of copyright to bar the access Americans have to information and entertainment, when, how and in the form they choose appropriate for their children, says Gary Shapiro, CEA’s President and CEO.

Parody has always been considered protected speech under copyright law, and the most famous parody musician Weird Al Yankovic has used both the law as well as common sense for his parodies — he asks the artists if he can parody their songs. If they say no, like Prince always has, he won’t do a parody. Now it seems the artists’ wishes are irrelevant, as we see in a song Weird Al parodied with approval of the artist, but had to retract from an album due to the record label’s demands.⁴

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