‘Voluntary’ website blocking scheme threatens free expression

June 23rd, 2011

Leaked documents have revealed British government plans that could seriously affect web users. Peter Bradwell reports

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US senator blocks controversial anti-piracy legislation

May 27th, 2011

Just hours after the PROTECT IP Act passed unanimously in the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, Democratic Senator Ron Wyden from Oregon placed a hold to prevent it from reaching the Senate. Wyden argued the legislation was an “overreaching approach to policing the internet.” The act was introduced two weeks ago and authorises the government to use court orders to prohibit internet search engines from displaying sites that violate intellectual property laws. It would also force internet providers to block “rogue” sites offering pirated goods.Media groups fighting for anti-piracy protection have largely praised the legislation.

EU plan to fight piracy may lead to internet policing, say critics

May 27th, 2011

The European Commission’s plan to tackle internet copyright infringements, such as illegal media downloads, would require internet service providers to work with the entertainment industry to monitor content. Critics fear this could lead to censorship and over-monitoring. BEUC, the European Consumers’ Organisation said, “Such practices would turn ISPs into some sort of Internet police that monitors the online behaviour of users and enforces copyright legislation. Fundamental rights of users will be jeopardized, namely the right to privacy and the right to due process.” Just last year, a judge ruled in Australia that an ISP company was not responsible for illegal downloading, stating that “If the ISPs become responsible for the acts of their customers, essentially they become this giant and very cheap mechanism for anyone with any sort of legal claim.”

Set yourself free

September 13th, 2010

Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood explains why the band released their last album direct to their fans
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US copyright body rules on video artists

July 27th, 2010

The body responsible for interpreting copyright law within the United States has broadened the exemptions available to video artists seeking to re-use copyrighted material in not-for-profit work. The US Copyright Office’s judgment means that short sections of pre-existing footage can now be legally used in new pieces; for example, online video memes (such as the one based on a segment of footage from the film Downfall) would now be protected from copyright claims.

UK: BT and TalkTalk challenge Digital Economy Act

July 12th, 2010

Two of the United Kingdom’s largest internet service providers (ISPs) have requested a judicial review be launched into the Digital Economy Act. BT and TalkTalk claim that the act, designed to reduce internet piracy, contravenes European Union legislation. They say the act, which was rushed through parliament before the May general election, will force them to disconnect customer subscriptions on copyright grounds. BT and TalkTalk claim the regulations infringe basic rights and freedoms whilst financially disadvantaging larger ISPs because the legislation will not apply to ISPs with less than 400,000 subscribers.

USA: $1bn YouTube copyright case dismissed

June 25th, 2010

On 23 June, Viacom’s $1bn lawsuit against YouTube was thrown out by a US judge. The entertainment company had raised the claim citing widespread copyright infringement by the Google owned video hosting site. However, in his summary judgment, District Judge Louis Stanton held that Youtube was protected by the “safe provision” in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act because they had swiftly removed all offending videos when prompted.

PAST EVENT: Copyright, Copyleft

April 6th, 2010

Who Owns the Words?
Sunday 6 June
The Guardian Hay Festival, Wales

Articles abound about the ways the internet, twitter, text-messaging and Facebook status updates have changed the culture of reading and writing across the globe. This year Google scaled back its ambitious project to put the world’s books on the web, but for how long? The potential replacement of our beloved ink and paper objects with cold electronic devices—an eventuality in which many of us still refuse to believe—came one sinister step closer this year. The must-have gift of the 2009 holiday season? The e-book reader.

It’s high noon in the digital age, but many of us are still lounging in bed. We’ve been hitting the snooze button since the 90s, refusing to wake from a dream we began in the nineteenth century, when advancing technologies in mass-production made music and image, film and literature widely available. Copies were cheap, and copyright laws have historically protected artists and allowed distributors to prosper. But technology marches on, dragging the culture behind it, and a little over two hundred years later, copies are no longer cheap—they’re free.

Among the many provocative arguments David Shields makes in his new book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, he argues that the economic model based on the copy is not only no longer sustainable, it’s no longer relevant:

The new model is based on the intangible assets of digital bits: copies are no longer cheap but free and flow freely everywhere. As computers retrieve images from the web or displays from a server, they make temporary internal copies of those works. Every action you invoke on your computer requires a copy of something to be made. Many methods have been employed to try to stop the indiscriminate spread of copies, including copy-protection schemes, hardware-crippling devices, education programs, and statutes, but all have proved ineffectual. The remedies are rejected by consumers and ignored by pirates. Copies have been dethroned; the economic model built on them is collapsing. In a regime of superabundant free copies, copies are no longer the basis of wealth. Now relationships, links, connection and sharing are. Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer and engage a work.

We have become a culture virtually and literally inundated with “cultural artifacts and debris: all of this is part of our lives, but much of it is off limits or artistic expression because someone ‘owns’ it.” In a world where so much content has become so readily accessible, isn’t it a natural development that artists want to make use of available material? This debate over ownership and appropriation in music is widely known—musical artists have been fighting for the right to creatively “sample” for decades. But the debate has been more subdued, perhaps more settled in literature. Or has it?

Shields’ book is made up of some 600 aphorisms, mini-essays, provocative statements and unattributed quotations. Using both his own words and the words of others, he takes on the nature of art, pits fiction against non-fiction, essay against story and imagination against invention. Citing a a literary history of unattributed copying, cribbing and appropriation that includes Nabokov, TS Eliot and Shakespeare, Shields fought for the right to publish hisManifesto without attribution. He lost.

So the question arises, who owns the words? Who owns the music, the images, the stories and touchstones of our culture? The individual artists, the distributing corporations, or the consumers who purchase it? Index on Censorship and Penguin Books bring together a provocative panel, including Mr Shields, to discuss creative sampling the age of the easy copy, and whether the evolution of copyright—long considered a protection of the artist’s creative output, has actually become an obstacle to the ‘natural evolution of human creativity’.

For more information visit the Guardian Hay Festival website