A few points I want to bring up concerning the Dallon piece. First, I think it is a little ironic that the Copyright Law of 1790 pretty much COPIES EXACTLY the Statute of St Anne.

Anne – “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by Vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or Purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned.”

1790 – “An Act for the encouragement of Learning, by Securing the copies of maps, charts, and books, to the authors and proprietors of such copies, during the times therein mentioned.”

I know, its all in the subtle difference, but common. If you want to promote originality, be original.

Okay, all banter aside. I thought it was interesting how the early founders of copyright law believed that the security of a copyright would “encourage men of learning and genius to publish their writings.” Though reluctant to support a limited monopoly, the founders, namely Madison, believed that the ‘public benefit rationale’ trumped any sort of ‘natural property right’ rationale. I guess the argument goes something like this: Encourage learning by introducing books, and introduce more books by creating a copyright law that encourages the creation of new works through protection and compensation (wordy).

With this mindset, the 1790 law was born. Further, the 1830 House committee “appreciated” there was a correlation between strong copyright protection and the production of works. I’m not sure how much I believe this…at least in current times. This again might be an issue of changing times/technology, but I see indie bands as a counter-argument. These bands delve into the business unsure if they’ll ever see any sort of compensation; and often times they don’t (i.e. Radiohead, In Rainbows set-your-own-price release. Although I think they made a decent amount of money off that release). Yet they continue to produce unbelievable music. Then again that probably has less to do with copyright than it has to do with the industry itself. Nevertheless I think our generation as a whole is willing to take that chance. I don’t think that a stronger copyright law would encourage more production. As we’ve talked about in class, the law itself cannot be readily applied, and is thus not a serious factor. Nor do I think that a lack of copyright law would inhibit production. Maybe I’m naïve, but I just don’t see the correlation (check out Film, TV Music Composers Urge Copyright Law Change. I posted this article on delicious a few days ago. I guess it proves me wrong.)

Alright, enough babbling. I’ll leave you with the question I was posed with after reading Dallon’s piece. Do you think that copyright law, as originally intended, has indeed facilitated the production of new works, both in the ‘olden days’ and now?

Starting of a class talking about copyright, I thought it apropos to post about everyone’s favorite cyberpirates, The Pirate Bay.  In case you’ve no idea what The Pirate Bay is (hi, mom!) check out the Wikipedia entry, go right to their website, or check out this fancy little slide show (I tried to get all fancy and embed this slide show, but my embedding skills are sub par, so here’s the distinctly web 1.0 way of sharing this).

Without getting too specific, TPB has been facing a lot of legal heat recently as the place where organizations like the RIAA and MPAA are trying to pin their arguments against piracy via bit torrents.  Depending on who you ask, it’s been going less than smoothly for TPB, so it seems that they’re starting to explore alternatives.  In addition to alternatives like selling the domain name, the leaders of TPB are encouraging their fellow pirates to keep on copying, so they’re promoting a new kind of way of bit torrenting.  One might even say the future of bit torrent.

Check out the slide show for the best description of what “the future of bit torrent” is, but essentially what it does it distribute the list of files (the tracker) on to everyone’s computer.  Instead of a single place where the whole list is kept, it’s not spread out across the network.  This new development is particularly interesting in a few ways.  First, it’s a great example of how it’s going to be really difficult for the legal system to stay ahead of technology.  Right now, the legal system is trying to blame the TPB founders for assisting copyright infringement because they are the administrators of a list of files that can be pirated.  Even if it’s decided that TPB is culpable, that’s really only going to effect the three founders.  Once this list goes away, and the entire torrent tracking system becomes decentralized, it takes away any one group to target.

This is also an interesting to me because it highlights how technical understanding internet piracy is.  Many (most?) of our parents couldn’t tell you the first thing about torrenting, never mind the underlying technical understanding of how the files are saved and reconstituted.  Unfortunately, people from our parent’s generation, and older, are the ones who are ultimately responsible for creating the laws that affect copyright laws.  This is unfortunate not because old people are in charge, but because our legislators haven’t had the exposure to these technologies from a young age so as to develop a deep understanding, and despite the importance of the issue, legislators just don’t have time to become experts in such a technical topic.  This leads to situations where people can be influenced by “authority” or just by convincing but misleading arguments.  I don’t know what the answer is here, but it’s very concerning to me to see the divide between the decision makers and the masses.

Thoughts on how to bridge this divide in a constructive manner?

If you don’t already use Firefox, you should, its free, safe, and easy to use. Next, download the Delicious toolbar, so you can start tagging links for the rest of the class.

Welcome to the CCC blog. This will be the place where students enrolled in the class blog interesting items, discuss issues, and generally engage on the topic.