IP: Re: copyright vs. technology

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

>Date: 29 May 2001 20:05:43 -0400
>From: "John R Levine" <johnl@iecc.com>
>To: "Dave Farber" <farber@cis.upenn.edu>
>
>
> >>Protection via lawyers means that each and every transaction is
> >>risky, problematic, and costly, but most of all that the protection
> >>is only available to those with large legal staffs.
>
> >>Protecting via technology extends the protection to both large
> >>players and ordinary folk.  Joe Sixkpack can publish digital property
> >>by combining his own content with other objects  purchased from
> >>others, with the ensemble protected via technology instead of
> >>copyright law, courts and lawyers.
>
>Maybe I'm biased from having sold a lot of books and gotten paid via
>contracts negotiated under copyright law, but I don't think this
>viewpoint stands up under analysis.
>
>First, you don't need a large legal staff to use copyright
>effectively.  Assuming you register your copyrights, the statutory
>penalties for violations are large enough that lawyers will take a
>case on contingency, i.e., without an up-front payment.  Registration
>is easy, fill out a form and send it in with two copies of the stuff
>to be registered and a small filing fee.  It's true, it's not
>cost-effective for material that isn't likely to be worth at least a
>few hundred dollars, but that's a feature; copyright is intended to
>offer the opportunity to reap significant reward for significant
>effort, not to lock down every two-minute hack.
>
>Second, the scheme that Cox proposes is more or less Ted Nelson's
>Xanadu model.  It depends on a global micropayments system, which
>doesn't exist despite years of effort by smart people, with no
>likelihood I can see of becoming real.  Lacking micropayments, you
>sell material in large chunks for amounts of money large enough to be
>worth clearing through existing payment systems.  Content distribution
>systems like that already exist, of course.  We call them "book
>stores".
>
>Third, a micropayments scheme depends just as much on laws and lawyers
>as copyright does.  Were a micropayments scheme to exist, it would
>have all the bugs and hacking problems of any other banking system,
>needing a legal framework just like any other banking system.  (How
>does someone in Tunisia remit 0.13 cents to you?  If his payment
>bounces or turns out to be counterfeit, what recourse do you have?
>Conversely, when someone in Tunisia bills you 0.13 cents for something
>you didn't read, how do you challenge the charge?)
>
>And finally, the "technical" scheme also depends on laws and lawyers.
>Any sort of copy protection will be broken somehow if the material it
>protects is valuable enough.  Maybe someone will find bugs in the
>crypto code, maybe they'll just circumvent it by OCR'ing screen
>images, but they'll do it somehow, and then what?  The legal system
>has evolved to "fail soft" with police and courts to handle the cases
>where people don't obey the laws and appeals courts and legislatures
>to handle the cases where the result from the court is wrong.  But
>once the content escapes from the dongleware, then what?  Well, I
>suppose you could sue.
>
>Copyright is a legally-brokered deal between authors and readers that
>has worked well for over 250 years.  I am certainly no fan of gross
>overreaches like the 95 year copyright term and the reverse
>engineering prohibitions in the DMCA, nor do I have much sympathy for
>people who demand iron-clad intellectual property protection for every
>two-sentence document or twelve-line program.  But copyright's deal of
>a limited copying monopoly for a limited time independent of the
>underlying technology has a lot to recommend it, and it's extremely
>premature to panic and give up on it merely because of a few years of
>rapid technological change that haven't yet shaken out.
>
>Regards,
>John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for 
>Dummies",
>Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://iecc.com/johnl, Sewer 
>Commissioner
>Finger for PGP key, f'print = 3A 5B D0 3F D9 A0 6A A4  2D AC 1E 9E A6 36 
>A3 47



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