There are so many profoundly stupid, self-defeating or slickly corrupt initiatives out there at the moment in the area of intellectual property and digital rights management. The collective impression I get is of a slow form of economic and cultural suicide in which liberal democratic societies destroy the legal infrastructures of the open society while businesses invested in the production and dissemination of popular culture foul their own revenue streams in pursuit of the diminishing returns they can squeeze from untapped sources.
Via BoingBoing, I’ve come across a serious candidate for the worst of the worst. I wasn’t aware, for one, of just how crappy the prevailing legal interpretation of fair use in Australia is already. It’s so bad that public schools have to pay a per pupil fee for the privilege of photocopying any materials for classroom use to the Copyright Agency Limited. (Cory at BoingBoing gets it slightly wrong: the CAL, when you read through the material, is a private alliance of collecting bodies, but complicatedly, is named by statute as the legitimate body for collection, so it has a kind of peri-official character.)
I don’t understand how so many people can get in such a (legitimate) lather about protecting the rights of Danish newspapers to publish cartoon representations of Muhammed while ignoring this kind of slow strangulation of the free exchange of information, especially in the context of primary education. At best, it’s the kind of stricture that promotes collective national mediocrity; at worst, the cumulative impact on a free society starts to compare to a military attack by an enemy. Why Australian taxpayers tolerate this kind of bureaucratic-managerial extortion which ends up costing them money in the form of fees paid to the Copyright Agency while restricting the scope and potential of their children’s education is beyond me. (The fee is assessed, apparently, by looking at a random sampling of schools and their usage of photocopying: that’s guaranteed to lead to strong fiscal pressures to not photocopy and thus to restrict what children can learn while also guaranteeing that the government has to make a copyright-fee budget line in order to pay the Copyright Agency its pound of flesh every year.)
Now apparently the same Copyright Agency (CAL) is getting more ambitious and looking to extract a per-usage fee whenever primary school teachers direct students to use websites. Holy 21st Century Dickensianisms! Why not just go and steal candy from babies or turn orphanages into schools for pickpockets? Why not rifle through the property of old people in nursing homes? That would be more honest. On whose behalf is the CAL trying to assess this fee? To whom will a share of it be paid? Who puts something up on the web for which they expect to be paid? I hold the copyright to all of what I’ve put up on four blogs. Not in my name! Not in the name of the vast majority of people who put material on the web. Not in the name of at least one author who is a member of the CAL. If it turns out that this is in fact what the CAL is trying to collect, fees from per-usage of all websites in Australian schools, then that’s a violation of copyright, not an enforcement of it–acting as an undesignated agent.
I’m trying to track down more information about what seems to me to be unspeakably bad public policy and unspeakably greedy and self-defeating business strategy (self-defeating for everybody but the CAL, that is: no wonder their revenues are up. That’s like Blackbeard posting good annual results after sacking the Spanish Main). When you read this press release, the picture gets murkier–it sounds almost as if the CAL is trying to make sure schools don’t digitize materials into PDF or other formats and so avoid photocopying fees. But other reports make it sound like this is a classic piece of shakedown rights-squatting where they’re starting as ambitiously as they can to see what they can get people to cough up as a result. Even if it’s just about avoiding a digital workaround of the photocopy fees, it’s still indefensible, since the prevailing Australian interpretation of fair use is a crap idea in the first place.
“I don’t understand how so many people can get in such a (legitimate) lather about protecting the rights of Danish newspapers to publish cartoon representations of Muhammed while ignoring this kind of slow strangulation of the free exchange of information, especially in the context of primary education.”
Because this story is dull, dull, dull. You say the words “Copyright Agency” and “in Australia”, and My Eyes Glaze Over. Sure, it’s important. Sure, it’s nasty. But you wonder why people don’t care? Because it involves bureaucracy, and legal jargon, and other people’s money halfway around the world. It took me 24 hours to comment, and that’s only because no one else did. (I’d make a bad Quaker; I should only comment when the spirit truly moves me.)
Yeah, fair enough in terms of how arcane this material is, but that’s why it scares me more. World ending in a whimper rather than a bang stuff.
One thing being at Swarthmore has taught me is that the spirit moves certain Quakers rather a lot…
And because expanding copyright makes a signficant faction richer.
“The collective impression I get is of a slow form of economic and cultural suicide in which liberal democratic societies destroy the legal infrastructures of the open society while businesses invested in the production and dissemination of popular culture foul their own revenue streams in pursuit of the diminishing returns they can squeeze from untapped sources. ”
It’s not suicide, it’s certain factions parasitizing the rest of society. Most people aren’t aware of what’s being done. At best, they are misinformed that they’re protecting something important to society.
“…dull, dull, dull…”
This is the biggest problem for Swarthmore’s student group Free Culture. We can’t seem to make this stuff interesting. As a consequence, we can’t make anyone else care and we end up with this isolated group of dedicated people doing their own thing. And then our own members get bored and leave (as is sort of happening to me), even though FC’s issues may be the most important around.
Then there are the matters like the RIAA suing students over music, which people could be interested in. But if you feel your position needs to be nuanced (I’m not completely comfortable saying that downloaders are “in the right”), you end up even more dull (or worse).
It’s a lot harder than “Coke murders union leaders!” (By the way, Coca Cola has a full-page ad in the Phoenix today. That’s sort of cool.)
There are materials on the internet that are put up in violation of copyright. If CAL could accurately estimate how often these materials are accessed by students using their surveys, it would be legitamate to charge schools for this in the same way they charge for photocopies of copyrighted materials. I don’t think this happens that often.
CAL is also trying to make some bullshit argument about teacher directed browsing being a copyright violation. Bullshit arguments with little chance of success are quite common when there is enough money at stake. I doubt the administrative judge will fall for it, but if he does I doubt any bad decision made by the administrative judge will be binding in other contexts.
CAL is effectively just a weird way for Australia to susidize Australian authors. They do some surveys, the government is charged based on the results, and Australian authors get some money. I think they just pretend that none of the materials copied are from non-australian authors. The fact that they don’t pay non-australian authors, effectively means that the government granted itself imunity to public school copyright infringement and then subsidizes australian authors based on a copyright-related metric. They could subsidize australian authors based on surveys of the students’ lunch selections if they wanted to, it doesn’t nessesarily mean that there is an valid IP right involved in whatever metric they use.