Stephen Evans, BBC News; Copyright: time to change the laws?:
"The issue of copyright has to strike a delicate balance between protecting the creators of music, words or photographs and the dissemination of such material to a wider public.
On the one hand, you want to ensure that the creators get paid for what they create. On the other, if copyright protection is too tight, then dissemination of material becomes too restricted.
In the 18th century the spread of knowledge was dependent on reprinting.
A book produced in London or Paris would be reprinted in Geneva, Edinburgh or Dublin.
"That led to arguments among publishers and authors about whether reprinting was immoral or illegal," says Adrian Johns at the University of Chicago.
Blurred boundaries
The concept of intellectual property was based around the distinction between mechanical invention, and literary or cultural creation.
That idea is now less appropriate to the ways in which creativity is carried out - software development, biotechnology and gene science all conflict between the mechanical and the intellectual.
The advent of the internet has changed the way copyright works.
Under the previous technology, going into a shop and stealing a music CD was theft, and yet down-loading tracks from the internet seems un-theft-like.
This attitude, that if it is on the web then it is free, is even more pronounced with photographic images. When pictures were printed on paper it was easy to control, but new technology makes those old laws out-dated or at least difficult to enforce...
Future solutions
A few companies in Silicon Valley are working on ways for copyright information to be an integral part of the image which cannot be removed.
William Fisher at Harvard University thinks copyright protection is too strict, so, for example, works of art derived from photographs are blocked.
"There needs to be more creative freedom," he believes.
"The current system is over-protective. It extends copyright protection to too every snapshot, every digital image - billions are being created every minute all around the world and they are all protected by copyright law."
He acknowledges that a system is needed that affords protection to photographers who wish to have control over their work.
"But too much copyright protection impedes cultural conversations and cultural usage," he says.
He says there should be a change of bias when protecting work.
"It would be better if the photographer registered any image be wanted to protect with an online registration system," he says, "and that any other work was in the public domain.""
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/10118823.stm
Showing posts with label Adrian Johns. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Adrian Johns. Show all posts
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Monday, February 22, 2010
Yo, Ho, Ho, and a Digital Scrum; Chronicle of Higher Education, 2/21/10
Jeffrey Young, Chronicle of Higher Education; Yo, Ho, Ho, and a Digital Scrum:
History shows that intellectual property is more complex than either its creators or copiers care to admit, says a Chicago scholar
"The history of publishing is swimming with pirates—far more than Adrian Johns expected when he started hunting through the archives for them. And he thinks their stories may hold keys to understanding the latest battles over digital publishing—and the future of the book.
Johns, a historian at the University of Chicago, has done much of his hunting from his office here, which is packed so high with books that the professor bought a rolling ladder to keep them in easy reach. He can rattle off a long list of noted pirates through the years:
Alexander Pope accused "pyrates" of publishing unauthorized copies of his work in the 18th century. At the beginning of the 19th century, a man known as the "king of the pirates" used the then-new technology of photolithography to spread cheap reprints of popular sheet music. In the 1950s, a pirate music label named Jolly Roger issued recordings by Louis Armstrong and other jazz greats from LP's that the major labels were no longer publishing. A similar label put out opera recordings smuggled from the Soviet bloc.
Along with the practice itself, "pirates" in publishing just keep resurfacing, and Johns argues that the label is no accident. He sees it as the pirates' attempt to evoke romantic notions of seafaring swashbucklers. Sure, the copying done by culture pirates may be technically illegal, but they have long claimed the moral high ground, arguing that they are not petty thieves, but principled heroes rightfully returning creative work to a public commons by making free or cheap copies available.
"There is an association with a certain kind of liberty—living perhaps alongside the law rather than in direct opposition to it," Johns says. "What the pirate community can represent is a kind of alternative that has its own virtues."
Johns has collected these and other pirate lessons in a new book, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars From Gutenberg to Gates (University of Chicago Press). The weighty work, more than 550 pages, covers hundreds of years of history of copyright and intellectual property in the West, focusing on the stories of those angling to disrupt prevailing practices.
The codified rules and laws allowing an author or publisher to claim exclusive rights to a literary work—what we now call "copyright"—did not develop until the 18th century, long after the printing press was invented. And since then the notion has been challenged again and again—sparking controversy long before the latest disputes over the pirating of music, movies, and other material over high-speed digital networks."
http://chronicle.com/article/Learning-From-Culture-Pirates/64294/
History shows that intellectual property is more complex than either its creators or copiers care to admit, says a Chicago scholar
"The history of publishing is swimming with pirates—far more than Adrian Johns expected when he started hunting through the archives for them. And he thinks their stories may hold keys to understanding the latest battles over digital publishing—and the future of the book.
Johns, a historian at the University of Chicago, has done much of his hunting from his office here, which is packed so high with books that the professor bought a rolling ladder to keep them in easy reach. He can rattle off a long list of noted pirates through the years:
Alexander Pope accused "pyrates" of publishing unauthorized copies of his work in the 18th century. At the beginning of the 19th century, a man known as the "king of the pirates" used the then-new technology of photolithography to spread cheap reprints of popular sheet music. In the 1950s, a pirate music label named Jolly Roger issued recordings by Louis Armstrong and other jazz greats from LP's that the major labels were no longer publishing. A similar label put out opera recordings smuggled from the Soviet bloc.
Along with the practice itself, "pirates" in publishing just keep resurfacing, and Johns argues that the label is no accident. He sees it as the pirates' attempt to evoke romantic notions of seafaring swashbucklers. Sure, the copying done by culture pirates may be technically illegal, but they have long claimed the moral high ground, arguing that they are not petty thieves, but principled heroes rightfully returning creative work to a public commons by making free or cheap copies available.
"There is an association with a certain kind of liberty—living perhaps alongside the law rather than in direct opposition to it," Johns says. "What the pirate community can represent is a kind of alternative that has its own virtues."
Johns has collected these and other pirate lessons in a new book, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars From Gutenberg to Gates (University of Chicago Press). The weighty work, more than 550 pages, covers hundreds of years of history of copyright and intellectual property in the West, focusing on the stories of those angling to disrupt prevailing practices.
The codified rules and laws allowing an author or publisher to claim exclusive rights to a literary work—what we now call "copyright"—did not develop until the 18th century, long after the printing press was invented. And since then the notion has been challenged again and again—sparking controversy long before the latest disputes over the pirating of music, movies, and other material over high-speed digital networks."
http://chronicle.com/article/Learning-From-Culture-Pirates/64294/
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