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Culture wants to be free

In my previous discussions of copyright, I mentioned that I was reading Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig. I’ve finished the book, so now I’d like to offer my thoughts.

In short, Lessig describes how the current copyright system is broken and his attempts and ideas for fixing it. He explains the history of copyright law, which dates back to olde England, where the first law protecting authors and their written works for a limited period was passed in 1710. Toward the end of the century, the framers of the US Constitution saw it fit to declare in Article I, Section 8, that “Congress shall have the power … To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors … the exclusive Right to their … Writings …”

Congress passed America’s first copyright law in 1790. Registered works would be protected for 14 years, with an optional 14-year renewal, so the maximum term was 28 years. Over the next 170 years, Congress extended the maximum term twice, to 42 years in 1831 and to 56 years in 1909. Not all works were registered for copyright protection, and only a small percentage of copyrights were renewed; the vast majority of works were no longer deemed commercially viable by their publishers, so they passed into the public domain without renewal. What’s more, copyright restrictions originally applied to verbatim copies; the concept of “derivative works” wasn’t introduced until 1870, and at that time it applied only to translations and dramatizations.

During this time, America’s culture flourished as creative minds built on past works in novel ways. Lessig notes in particular that Walt Disney became a household name by borrowing from 19th-century authors as well as contemporary popular culture; Steamboat Willie was a parody of the Buster Keaton film Steamboat Bill, Jr., which had been released only a few months earlier. Disney and others benefited from a free culture in which works of the past (and, to some extent, works of the present) could spur creativity by being appropriated and re-interpreted.

In recent years, things have changed. The courts have greatly expanded the definition of derivative works. Copyright protection is granted automatically without the need for so much as a copyright notice, and it can be hard to get permission to use a copyrighted work if you can’t figure out who owns the copyright. It’s now an opt-out system rather than an opt-in one. And since 1962, Congress has extended the term of copyright 11 times. Nowadays, the copyright term for a typical work lasts until 70 years after the author’s death. The result is copyright terms that could last 150 years or more. Every time important works are scheduled to enter the public domain, Congress intervenes and pushes copyright terms further. Many works published as early as 1923 are still copyrighted. Our free culture is dying because everything around us is shackled by unprecedented terms of oppressive copyright restrictions. We have nothing to turn to for creativity but the increasingly distant public domain and our own solitary minds.

Recently, Lessig was involved in an important court case involving copyright. His client, Eric Eldred, would post public domain books on his web site. In 1998, after the latest copyright extension act was passed, he posted books that should have passed into the public domain that year but whose copyright was extended by the new law. This got him into some legal trouble, and Lessig and others represented him. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where Lessig tried to prove that if Congress had the power to extend copyright terms as much as it wanted, then it was acting outside its Constitutional power to secure copyright terms “for limited Times.” Unfortunately, the court ruled 7-2 against Eldred.

In the book, Lessig mentions two possible solutions to help bring back our free culture. The first is Creative Commons, an organization he founded that provides licenses for content creators to apply to their works. These licenses allow authors to relinquish some of the exclusive rights to their work and let others know what they can and can’t do with the work. For example, I have decided to make the content of this web site available under the terms of an Attribution-ShareAlike license. You can do anything you want with anything on my web site—translate it into Japanese, make a collage out of the pictures, perform it as a musical, publish it as a book and sell it—provided that you attribute me properly and release your new work under the same license so that others can be free to do with it what they wish. Other licenses provide other options.

Lessig’s other possible solution is copyright reform. He proposes a sort of return to the old system. He suggests that while copyright protection should still be granted automatically, the term should be 50 years with the possibility of renewal for a nominal fee. Under this system, when a work is renewed, it is added to a central registry so that people can be sure whether it is still copyrighted or in the public domain. The addition of a nominal renewal fee would allow the 97% of creative works that are out of print to enter the public domain early—just like in the olden days—while the 3% that are still being sold would get additional protection. This way, we wouldn’t have out-of-print books rotting on the bookshelves for 100 years or more because the publishing company (or its corporate successor) is jealously guarding a right that it will never again exercise.

So that’s Free Culture in a nutshell, unless I forgot something. It really is an interesting read, and I recommend it to everyone. Fortunately, the book is not only available in print but also online. So get Free Culture! The PDF version of the book is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license, meaning you can share it with your friends, translate it, record it as an audiobook, or whatever—just as long as you give the author credit and you don’t use it for commercial purposes.

Recently, I talked about the benefits of using encryption for e-mail. It turns out that there’s a new virus going around that encrypts your data so that you can’t access it. The antivirus software company Kaspersky estimates that 15,000,000 modern computers would have to work for a year to crack the 1024-bit key. In my previous post, I was making up numbers as to how easily such keys could be cracked. By extension, I estimate that it would take 8.7 × 10⁹³¹ computer-years to crack a 4096-bit key like the one I use to encrypt my e-mail. But computing power increases exponentially by Moore’s law, and effective encryption-breaking algorithms may be devised, so who knows what the future will bring?

Dennis Kucinich is my hero. He’s brought some articles of impeachment of George W. Bush. Of course, the rest of the Democrats are too chicken to follow through with it, so everybody thinks the idea is ridiculous and that Kucinich is a loony. But think about what Bill Clinton got impeached for.

TV shows automatically get funnier when you bleep out random words. Thus: Boy Meets World: Director’s Cut.

Here’s a company that’s making a tiny electric car: Myers Motors (Flash/sound warning).