Public Domain

Barriers to Cultural Participation

Last week I completed my draft contribution to the Exploratory Workshop on Consuming the Illegal: Situating Digital Piracy in Everyday Experience which will be held in Leuven (17‐19 April 2011). The draft paper is called Barriers to Cultural Participation: Cultural Innovation and Control Online and attempts to go deeper into the problem of borrowing or appropriating earlier works in the creation of new cultural material.

What I am attempting to do is to point to the problem that while the law is a useful tool of regulation a great deal of regulatory power is in the hands of norms. The result is that amateur remixing is discriminated against and often runs the risk of being lost, instead of being encouraged as an important source for growth of cultural material.

So the paper looks at different forms of re-use (and gives examples of each). So in the end it looks like this… The thing to be discussed is therefore not the law but the ways in which certain types of remixing/borrowing/appropriation are tolerated while others seem not to be…

The end needs to be sharpened but here is what I have written so far (full draft is on scribd)

The topic of this paper was to take a closer look at some of the different ways in which cultural material is used and reused. In particular this work wanted to widen the discussion by not limiting it to being either a legal, technical or social topic. The production of innovative cultural material relies on a healthy access to earlier material, the creativity to expand on that material, the legal leeway to share that material and the technical platforms with which to reach other users.

For most of the history of copyright the most limiting factor for a large scale participatory cultural sphere has been limited by the lack of technical means with which to create and share the results of the work. Today these technological limitations have been reduced and are easily surpassed by most users wishing to participate in a cultural exchange.

We should therefore be entering into an unprecedented production of cultural material. One the one hand this is exactly what is happening. The amounts of copyrightable material being produced and spread today are far greater than in any other period in history. However, on the other hand, the legal risks and the regulation through licenses discussed here show that the material being produced and spread is discriminated against and is under risk of being removed, and its authors punished for their productions.

These issues need to be addressed. The original purpose of copyright, and its often legitimizing reason put forward today, is that by protecting the rights of the creator there will be an increased incentive to produce more material. Society offers a monopoly in return for an increased level of cultural material. However this bargain has been steadily eroded and is, at the point where it is technically possible for a wide scale participation in danger of being lost.

 

Posted on by mklang

What happens to works when they fall into the public domain?

This is a “wishing I was there post. So if you are anywhere near to London on 23 of March then I recommend the seminar/lecture “What happens to works when they fall into the public domain?”

This is from The 1709 Blog

…the seminar on this question, which it trailed here, now has a venue.  To refresh memories, the speaker is blog team member Jeremy’s friend, Professor Paul J. Heald, of the University of Georgia Law School, who presents some of his thoughts and — more importantly — the fruits of some of his own research.

The date of the seminar is Wednesday 23 March and it will be hosted in the lovely, airy room up on the sixth seventh floor of Olswang LLP’s offices at 90 High Holborn, London.  Registration begins at 5pm; the seminar starts at 5.30pm and, following questions and discussion, will end by 7pm.  Refreshments will be provided.

Admission to this seminar is free. To register, email Jeremy here and let him know (using the subject line ‘Heald Reg’).

Posted on by mklang

Happy Public Domain Day

The first of January is Public Domain Day. The purpose of celebrating this day is to remember the wealth of culture that enters into the public domain every year. The list this year includes notables such as  Walter Benjamin his The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is incredibly thought provoking, Mikhail Bulgakov – yes its time to reread The Master and Margarita, the artist Paul Klee and the Swedish Selma Lagerlof.

The Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University has a webpage dedicated to the day. The Center also points out that while in Europe works are entering the public domain changes in US law are preventing this from happening:

What is entering the public domain in the United States? Sadly, we will have nothing to celebrate this January 1st. Not a single published work is entering the public domain this year. Or next year. Or the year after. Or the year after that. In fact, in the United States, no publication will enter the public domain until 2019. And wherever in the world you live, you now have to wait a very long time for anything to reach the public domain. When the first copyright law was written in the United States, copyright lasted 14 years, renewable for another 14 years if the author wished. Jefferson or Madison could look at the books written by their contemporaries and confidently expect them to be in the public domain within a decade or two. Now? In the United States, as in most of the world, copyright lasts for the author’s lifetime, plus another 70 years. And we’ve changed the law so that every creative work is automatically copyrighted, even if the author does nothing. What do these laws mean to you? As you can read in our analysis here, they impose great (and in many cases entirely unnecessary) costs on creativity, on libraries and archives, on education and on scholarship. More broadly, they impose costs on our entire collective culture.

“We are the first generation to deny our own culture to ourselves. Almost no work created during your lifetime will, without conscious action by its creator, become available for you to reproduce or build upon.”

We have little reason to celebrate on Public Domain Day because our public domain has been shrinking, not growing. Samuel Beckett’s English-language version of Waiting for Godot, his existentialist play in which two characters wait for a Godot who never appears, was published in 1954 and would once have been entering the public domain on January 1, 2011. To quote Vladimir from the play: “But that is not the question. What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in this immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come—” 56 years later, we are still waiting.

Posted on by mklang

The Public Domain Mark

Important news from Creative Commons about the development of a new Public Domain Mark. This whole post is taken from the Creative Commons blog:

Almost 1½ years have passed since we launched CC0 v1.0, our public domain waiver that allows rights holders to place a work as nearly as possible into the public domain, worldwide, prior to the expiration of copyright. CC0 has proven a valuable tool for governments, scientists, data providers, providers of bibliographic data, and many others throughout world. At the time we published CC0, we made note of a second public domain tool under development — a tool that would make it easy for people to tag and find content already in the public domain.

We are publishing today for comment our new Public Domain Mark, a tool that allows works already in the public domain to be marked and tagged in a way that clearly communicates the work’s PD status, and allows it to be easily discoverable. The PDM is not a legal instrument like CC0 or our licenses — it can only be used to label a work with information about its public domain copyright status, not change a work’s current status under copyright. However, just like CC0 and our licenses, PDM has a metadata-supported deed and is machine readable, allowing works tagged with PDM to be findable on the Internet. (Please note that the example used on the sample deed is purely hypothetical at the moment.)

We are also releasing for public comment general purpose norms — voluntary guidelines or “pleases” that providers and curators of PD materials may request be followed when a PD work they have marked is thereafter used by others. Our PDM deed as well as an upcoming enhanced CC0 deed will support norms in addition to citation metadata, which will allow a user to easily cite the author or provider of the work through copy-paste HTML.

The public comment period will close on Wednesday, August 18th. Why so short? For starters, PDM is not a legal tool in the same sense our licenses and CC0 are legally operative — no legal rights are being surrendered or affected, and there is no accompanying legal code to finesse. Just as importantly, however, we believe that having the mark used soon rather than later will allow early adopters to provide us with invaluable feedback on actual implementations, which will allow us to improve the marking tool in the future.

The primary venue for submitting comments and discussing the tool is the cc-licenses mailing list. We look forward to hearing from you!

Posted on by mklang

The good, the bad & the ugly: Copyright & Open content licenses

Despite being close to the planning and organisation I had not paid attention to ensure that Creative Commons presented at this years FSCONS. Then today we had the unfortunate news that one of our presenters on Sunday was too ill to attend. So the opportunity presented itself and I will be presenting The good, the bad & the ugly: Copyright & Open content licenses

Taking its starting point in the principles, growth and development of open Creative Commons licenses this talk takes a closer look at what licenses can and cannot do in a world were copyright is attempting to lock-in culture into a eternal artificial monopoly.

Posted on by mklang

Public Domain Calculators

Ever heard of Public Domain calculators? Well they have been part of by guilty conscience since May last year. The idea is to create a flowchart for calculating when works enter the public domain. And my guilty conscience? Well I still haven’t finished the Swedish version yet. I know, I know… Anyway the pressure is on again since there will be a Public Domain Calculator meeting organized by the Open Knowledge Foundation in Cambridge in November… High time to get to work, so where did I put my notes…

Public Domain Calculators

There is often a tendency to talk of ‘the public domain’ and of works falling out of copyright and ‘into the public domain’ – as though there is a single set of works which are out of copyright all over the world. In fact, of course, there are different national laws about the nature and duration of copyright in different types of works – and hence what is in the public domain is different in different countries.

We’re currently coordinating work to build a series of public domain calculators – which will help to determine whether or not a given work is in copyright in a given jurisdiction. At the time of writing we have been in touch with groups and individuals interested in helping to build the calculators in 17 jurisdictions.

In November, the Open Knowledge Foundation in association with the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law at the University of Cambridge are hosting a meeting of European experts on copyright and the digital public domain as part of the Communia project. The purpose of the workshop is to produce materials such as legal flow charts and public domain “algorithms” which will help with the representation of different national copyright laws and the determination of public domain status.

Details of the meeting are as follows:

  • Participate: Free but space is limited. If you are interested in coming, email the organizers at: info@okfn.org
    • Posted on by mklang

    Disruption in Uppsala, Memory in Barcelona

    Despite needing sleep the presentation in disruptive technology presentation in Uppsala went well. The discussion focused on integrity and social networks and presented some of the early early results of the emerging research project. Now its onwards to Barcelona for the 6th Communia Workshop Memory Institutions and the Public Domain… This is going to be really good.

    Disruptive technology: Social Networks and Integrity (Samhällsomstörtande teknik: Sociala Nätverk och Integritet)

    Posted on by mklang

    Disrespectful handling of digitalized cultural artifacts

    On several occasions I have had the opportunity to discuss digitalization of traditional media. In particular to images that are no longer covered by copyright. Those who act as caretakers and gatekeepers for these cultural treasures have long been positive to digitalization – but were quick to discover that digitalization alone is not enough. The turning point of public opinion occurred when the Library of Congress began its pilot project with Flickr in the Flickr Commons. Read more about it on the Library of Congress blog or the report from the pilot.

    Despite the anecdotal evidence, the gut feeling and the report some gatekeepers are still concerned about what will happen to “their” images if the plebeian mass can access them freely.

    At first I thought their fears stemmed from a loss of income from selling prints, but this seems not to be their main concern even if some do refer to this. There main concern is the way in which the images will be treated.

    They fear the disrespectful handling of digitalized cultural artifacts.

    Now you may well ask yourselves how a digitalized artifact may be manhandled? Obviously it is not about destruction but there are concerns about use. The legal protection is long gone. The photographs are long since in the public domain and can be used and abused at will. This is of concern to the caretakers/gatekeepers since they have been entrusted with the images in physical form. In almost all cases they have received the photographs with a promise that they are preserving a part of cultural heritage. They believe that in their role as cultural preservers lies a duty to ensure that the photographers honor is not sullied by disagreeable online use.

    And they know all too well that once digitalization and access has been granted there is no longer any control.

    While I am a copyright minimalist and I think our protection terms are way too long I do feel there is a point here. How can museums and archives fulfill their duty to preserve what they have received in trust while maintaining their duty to provide access to culture?

    Then I look at the work done by the Swedish National Heritage Board in relation to this question. They have put a small selection of their images on the Flickr Commons. A mere 274 photographs by Carl Curman (1833-1913).

    The photographs have been accessed over 200  000 time since 17 March this year, that’s less than four months! Or 50 000 views per month (K-Blogg).

    Besides pushing the almost unknown Carl Curman to a portion of internet fame the project at the Swedish National Heritage Board has brought back to life a set of dead photographs. Image how many times a photograph is seen in it’s lifetime. The average must be depressingly low. The most popular photograph in their project has been viewed 7805 times. Stop. Read the numbers and think. Seven thousand eight hundred and five times.

    Stockholm by Carl Curman now seen by one more person: You…

    Sure the photo will be ripped off. It will be posted on websites, stored on computers, used in presentations and the name of Carl Curman will be disassociated from the picture he took. Even more certain is that the Swedish Cultural Heritage Board will not be attributed enough for their thankless task of bringing this dead cultural artifact to life. But let us remember the old adage – no good dead goes unpunished.

    The role of the caretaker/gatekeeper is, not a they once believed it to be, to prevent access. In the real world, grubby fingers and clumsy handling destroy the real artifact and lose it to the whole world. That is why we should be kept away from the real thing. But in the digital world the same is not true. What the flickr commons shows beyond a doubt is that while digitalization is good, it is nothing without access.

    Ask Carl Curman.

    Posted on by mklang

    Boyle Public Domain podcast

    Here is an interesting podcast of James Boyle on his book The Public Domain (via BoingBoing)

    Professor James Boyle describes how our culture, science and economic welfare all depend on the delicate balance between those ideas that are controlled and those that are free, between intellectual property and the public domain —the realm of material that everyone is free to use and share without permission or fee

    Intellectual property laws have a significant impact on many important areas of human endeavour, including scientific innovation, digital creativity, cultural access and free speech. And so Boyle argues that, just as every informed citizen needs to know at least something about the environment or civil rights, every citizen in the information age should also have an understanding of intellectual property law.

    The Public Domain: enclosing the commons of the mind

    MP3 Link

    Posted on by mklang