I am, frankly, on the side of the HD-DVD consortium on this. I am a firm believer in copyright protection and have refused numerous times to accept illegal copies of expensive software. Yeah, I’d like to have the software. But I grew up a while back, and realized that it’s wrong to steal. There’s a big difference between fair use (for example, using music clips in my podcast) and outright theft.
Michael Malone has a great article on the Diggers trying to subvert copyright law.
But the biggest problem with Digg is not the business itself, which is an impressive creation, but its community. One of the things we’re learning about the Web 2.0 world is that all communities aren’t alike; when you let millions of anonymous users design your product, you also let them determine your fate. And Digg has put itself in the hands of an army of postadolescents with too much education and too much free time, the age cohort that gets its news from “The Colbert Report” and holds the anarchistic view that all information should be, in fact, “wants to be,” free.
Nothing wrong with that. Indeed, been there, done that. But now, in my gray-haired middle-age I’ve come to realize that if you are going to create a venue for children to play, someone has to be the grown-up. And that is where Digg blew it.
[…] In other words, Digg was willing to block porn and hate sites, but was perfectly willing to violate trade secrets if its users said so.
It was a breathtaking abrogation of responsibility by a person in a position of authority. If you sign up to be sheriff, and are rewarded handsomely for doing so, then your job when the howling mob shows up outside the jail is defend the prisoner under attack, even if you despise him. At the very least, you run away and accept the shame of your cowardice. But the one thing you don’t ever do is join the mob knocking down the jailhouse door.
And that is exactly what Kevin Rose did. Rather than maturely endure the momentary anger of his community, he instead caved in the most craven manner possible. With a certain justice, all that this gutless move managed to do was earn Rose even more contempt for being two-faced and spineless.
Read it all.
Update: Background on the Digg revolution that the article above misses.
While it’s obvious why the creator of a movie or a song might deserve some special claim over the use of their creation, it’s hard to see why anyone should be able to pick a number at random and unilaterally declare ownership of it. There is nothing creative about this number — indeed, it was chosen by a method designed to ensure that the resulting number was in no way special. It’s just a number they picked out of a hat. And now they own it?
As if that’s not weird enough, there are actually millions of other numbers (other keys used in AACS) that AACS LA claims to own, and we don’t know what they are. When I wrote the thirty-digit number that appears above, I carefully avoided writing the real 09F9 number, so as to avoid the possibility of mind-bending lawsuits over integer ownership. But there is still a nonzero probability that AACS LA thinks it owns the number I wrote.
Problem is they are saying it is illegal to say a number (a rather large number usually expressed in hex). That is where I disagree with the consortium and feel they are wrong. How can you copyright a number?
As far as fair use vs. copyright, the reason the code was originally hacked is because the guy who hacked it could not play his HD-DVD on the machine he wanted to use . The encryption is instead a perfect example of using DRM to inhibit fair use.
That’s a problem with the DMCA. And, well, a problem with lobbyists having the ability to write the laws. And the culture of corruption that inhabits Washington.
Dammit, Jeff. You had to get me started.
I’m starting to think there should be a two-tiered copyright system. One for one-person (or small-team) authors, one for corporations. It’s the corporate copyrights that screw the rest of us.
I’m all for authors having their copyright for life-plus-50. I think it’s not right for a builder to be able to make a building and then will it to his heirs, but an author can’t do the same thing. (Well, now they can, but copyright used to be far fewer years.)
But I am not in favor of the Disney Corporation getting Washington to rewrite the copyright laws just as most of Disney’s early copyrights are about to expire.
Sorry. I was actually watching Digg that night and while it did get out of hand, most people were upset for legitimate reasons:
1. They thought the takedown was bogus and done badly (you are not allowed to copyright a number)
2. They were upset that the user who posted the code was kicked off Digg with no explanation.
Cory Doctorow also received a notice and if Digg had done what he did (replace the post with a pdf of the takedown notice that contained the code) AND not have deleted the user accounts, it would not have been the riot it was.
When Malone says:
He gets it entirely wrong. The users were saying that the post was not a violation of trade secret because trade secrets that are out in public are no longer secrets. If someone figured out, on their own, the formula to Coke, it would no longer be a trade secret and Coke would not be able to block them from publishing it.
Sorry, Meryl, but here you’re wrong. First, there is nothing wrong with publishing trade secrets. That’s on purpose. The price of keeping trade secrets instead of applying for patents is that if the secret leaks, you lose. You can only sue the leaker. Second, the DMCA does not protect trade secrets. Using DMCA takedown notices to that end happens to be an abuse of the DMCA, one which can get the HD-DVD consortium sued for big bucks. Third, copyright is not absolute. If you publish something under copyright, people are still allowed to use it in many legally enshrined ways that you may not like. TOUGH. For example, if you publish a documentary that does not hold up to scrutiny, I am allowed to take your documentary, chop it up, and release my own work, in which I play it piece by piece and inject my own fact checking. If you use technology to give yourself the right to prevent this, guess what, I can use technology to defeat your technology.
Okay, I guess I didn’t read enough background, Jeff. I was under the impression this was a copyright problem. I stand corrected.
But I do fall on the side of the copyright owner when it comes to not wanting to have people take their work for nothing, with the caveats I wrote above (and more that I did not go into).
Omri, I never said copyright was absolute. You need to actually argue the points I make, or even read my comments a little more closely, as you may have noticed I came down hard on the Sonny Bono copyright amendment for Big Business (a.k.a. Disney).
I am thoroughly familiar with the concept of copyright, Omri. I have been writing since I was eleven. Give me a little credit, please.
One last thing. Isn’t it interesting that Malone gets his checks from Disney. A little disclosure would have been nice.
I realize you write for a living, Meryl; this aspect of copyright law is really relevant only to video works, since it’s pretty much impossible to use DRM to protect any other kind.
Jeff, yes. He should have disclosed that.
This is another example of the “ones and zeroes” problem, as coined by Scott Adams.
Pointy Haired Boss: Wally, the people in networking found that you were storing pornographic images on the server.
Wally: That’s impossible, sir. The server is only capable of storing binary data. All it has is a string of ones and zeroes that, if you happen to pass them through certain programs, can be made to look like pornography. I think the network security group intentionally did so, in order to accuse me of storing pornography on the server.
PHB: I’ll have them fired for this.
Wally: Also, if it’s not too much trouble, I’d like to have my strings of ones and zeroes back.
Technically, EVERYTHING stored digitally, including programs that turn those numbers into pirated videos, are just numbers. Which ones can be copyrighted, and which ones can’t?
Be warned, the “common wisdom” has already declared “none of them” since the heydays of Napster, so it probably won’t give a flip about things like artist compensation, at least until artists start refusing to create anything that can be represented digitally.