Dan Gillmor on copyright

I just read Dan Gillmor: We must engage in copyright debate and it’s an excellent summary of what Lawrence Lessig is talking about. He writes that there’s “little or no constituency for fair use and other rights, partly because lawmakers are only hearing one side” – that is, Hollywood’s. If we don’t learn what copyright is about and “challenge the terms of the debate, [the community of readers, listeners, viewers, scholars, researchers and others] will surely lose”.

A few days ago, I recommended a Flash “movie” (not Shockwave) that Leonard Lin put together from Lessig’s slides and an audio recording of his talk at OSCON. We’ve put up a mirror for Leonard’s Flash movie and Lessig’s PowerPoint slides, etc, here at Oops. Do check it out.

Anyway, in his talk, Lessig says that it’s not about fair use, it’s about all those unregulated uses – like reading and giving away or selling your copy – that now risk to become fully controlled by the movie, music and publishing industries. “Stop talking about fair use,” Lessig says, these uses are unregulated. But the industry wants to control this. For example, DRM systems will encrypt your copy with a key that is unique to your machine, making it impossible to “consume” on any other machine.

In his talk, Lessig shows how Adobe restricts what you can do with e-book publications of works in the public domain, such as Aristotle’s Politics. For the e-book version of his own book, The Future of Ideas, all rights (copying to pasteboard, printing, reading aloud) have been disabled by the publisher. This is what will happen to all types of “content”, argues Lessig and Gillmor, if we, the “consumers”, don’t speak up.

As a non-American I feel frustrated, since much of the technology comes from America, and if the government makes new laws favoring the American industry, enabling technologies like DRM and very strict copy protection schemes, these technologies are forced upon the rest of the countries in the world. We have no say in the matter at all.

Therefore, it’s nice to see that people like Lessig and Gillmor are doing something. Gillmor is apparently planning more installments following this article. I’ve added the News Is Free RSS feed of his blog to my RSS reader (NetNewsWire Lite.) See also earlier posts on this topic – here – here – here – here – and here.