©ollectanea

I have read a number of things lately that reinforce the idea that copyright terms should be shorter to optimally promote the creation of new works. I blogged about two articles just last week, in particular, Rufus Pollock's, Forever Minus a Day? Some Theory and Empirics of Optimal Copyright, which concludes that 15 years is optimal. Today, Peter Suber notes that, in accordance with the original term of copyright, 14 years, John Ockerbloom is dedicating the works he authored when the Web was new (1993) to the public domain, as part of a celebration of public domain day: Peter Suber, Open Access News -- How to celebrate public domain day. Since reading Polluck's article, I've been contemplating adopting the Founder's Copyright for the Copyright Crash Course, so today, after reading Suber's post celebrating Public Domain Day, and having had a couple of weeks to think about it, I have decided that I will indeed adopt the Founder's Copyright for the Crash Course.

I went to the Creative Commons website to get the little "FC" icon and paste it on the Crash Course homepage, alongside the current CC 3.0 license I use, and discovered that it's not quite that easy. Unlike the other licenses, which give the public rights to use my works, but which don't divest me of the copyright, the Founder's Copyright actually entails a sale of the copyright in the Crash Course to the Creative Commons, the listing of the Crash Course in a registry with a notation about when it will enter the public domain, and an option to renew the copyright for an additional 14 years at the end of the term if I want to. That would be 2021. I can't imagine in any wild dream that the Crash Course still has value then, but whether it does or not, I thought about it, and I want others to take what's of value and reuse it by then, at the latest. I already have an attribution share-alike no commercial use license (the 3.0 license) on the Crash Course, so this just seems like a good next step. I'm only sorry that it's a bit more complicated than the other licenses, because I suspect that discourages many people from opting for it. For example, I would like to opt for a 14 year term for everything I have written since I started practicing law (some of which would be pd by now with a 14 year term), but of course, that's impossible to apply in practice. I can't even identify all those works or find copies of them. Just think about the nightmare it's going to be to sort out who can do what with what for works that aren't on the Web with attribution and clear rights allocated to the public, to say nothing of death dates, certain, etc. Just when the Internet has made it possible for us to benefit in concrete ways as never before from sharing our works with others, the law has made it almost impossible to do so legally. What is wrong with this picture?

Actually, it makes me want to just opt for public domain right here and right now. Why wait 14 years? Why not just create my own copyright notice that unambiguously dedicates everything I do from this moment on to the public domain? Well, there's attribution. That's about the only thing standing in the way. If you care about attribution, the pd is not quite the perfect fit it might otherwise be. Well, 14 years with a CC 3.0 should do the trick. That's what I'll stick with for now. Going forward, certainly, if not going back.

No need to comment really: Sony BMG Plans to Drop DRM. DRM is history in the music biz. Now for books and movies.

Larry Lessig announced today that the fourth of his books, The Future of Ideas (actually, the second book in order of publishing) has joined the other three in being licensed for free access under a Creative Commons license: The Future of Ideas is now Free (Lessig Blog). Of course, for an author of his statute, this kind of deal is doable whereas for most authors, it's probably not. But the more important aspect of his deal is the data that it generates as an experiment. Publishers have to find out what happens when they abandon their tried and true approaches, and it's a real shame that it takes someone begging them to try something new, but that's that. So, at least it's a toe in the water.

It's a new year. So much happened last year in the music industry, in the courts with respect to fair use for transformative works (mostly the search engine cases), tv on the Internet, the NIH OA mandate. What might we look forward to this year? I'm going to be focusing on change in scholarly publishing, beyond Open Access and the NIH -- the University Presses and library collaborations. The experimentation taking place in these venues is likely to be very robust this year, moreso than in commercial publishing, because the stakes are much higher for University Presses. They've come so much closer to the precipice than their commercial cousins. Just today I noticed that five University Presses had nabbed a huge Melon grant ($1.37 million) to study ways to streamline some of the backend tasks:

Top university presses announce a collaboration to find a way to reduce costs of scholarly publishing and to allow for more books to be released. Set up as a joint operation for copy-editing, design, layout and typesetting for the work in American literatures, the collaboration will be funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The five university presses involved are: the NYU Press, Rutgers University Press, Fordham University Press, Temple University Press and the University of Virginia Press.

Check out Scholarly Communication at U of Illinois for more details.

In addition to Press/library collaborations, I think we should keep an eye on the efforts of libraries and library organizations, as well as others, to make progress on the orphan works problem. Orphan works scream out for creative, collaborative solutions, and many people are putting their heads together to come up with ideas in the absence of meaningful (actually, in the absence of any) solutions from Congress.

And what do you think about the new initiative from the Center for Social Media to define as fair use a broad range of creative uses of others materials in the creation of videos? The report is called, Recut, Reframe, Recycle. I am very impressed, though not at all surprised. This Center has been in the vanguard of effectiveness by taking actions that are having concrete results. Perhaps Congress' ineffectiveness in restraining copyright's growth and strength has indirectly encouraged the tremendous surge in creative work-arounds. Not all by itself, of course. Massive consumer resistance has certainly had a part to play... Interesting to see it all moving along after 15 years of watching.

It is more than a bit confusing how the major labels can all have recognized only recently that DRM failed as a business model in connection with sales of tracks, and simultaneously have finally embraced p2p supported by advertising, but with DRM: Major Labels Allow P2P Music Sharing on QTrax | Listening Post from Wired.com. Why would they think that DRM would work in this context when it has failed so thoroughly in the non-p2p context? Just when it seemed that they were getting it together...

But, DRM aside, as many people probably know, scholars have long suggested that other revenues besides those tied to sales of copies were fully capable of compensating artists and distributors (but then, isn't that word just about to the point of being an oxymoron here?) for their contributions to a finished music product or experience. Terri Fisher's, "Promises to Keep," and Neil Netanel's NUL (Nonprofit use license) are two examples. See also Rob Kasunic's thoughtful analysis of The P2P Problem on Stanford's Fair Use site.

But, questionable reliance on DRM aside, this is pretty amazing. The text of the Wired article, "Major Labels Allow P2P Music Sharing on QTrax," admits they tried a dumb, 10 year-long experiment and it failed miserably, but they felt compelled to do it, and now they want to move forward. "Oh, whoops. We were wrong. P2P isn't all bad. Now come play with us." One of the comments sums up how perhaps many people greet this generous offer:

What the heck?! The Music Industry could have made a deal like this with Napster years ago and could have been rolling in so much money they wouldn't know what to do with it, but no they had to go and kill Napster and tick off millions of music fans in the process. I think this is too little too late for the RIAA. They've burned too many bridges in recent years. Their days are numbered.

DRM? No iPod support? Count 99.9% of the market out then, guys. What a joke. No different than other subscription services - the main difference is that the bandwidth cost is lower for QTrax and the labels because the CONSUMER is paying for the bandwidth - on their own broadband lines! What an insult.

So, it's good news certainly, but is it too little too late for the labels? And what is the role of copyright in the future of media if business models really do turn to forms of payment that don't seem to need to exploit a monopoly? Very interesting!

Well, it's more than a bit odd for a company to jump the gun as seriously at it appears that Qtrax did yesterday (see my post from yesterday, just below this one), according to this follow-up article, Wired News - AP News, and it may only be a matter of time, as Qtrax' president suggests, but still, the degree of misrepresentation throws the company's entire story into doubt...