“This is me. I’m here to answer,” said Tenenbaum. “I used the computer. I uploaded and downloaded music. This is how it is. I did it,” he testified before a packed courtroom, whose spectators included an all-star cast of Harvard Law School copyright scholars: Lawrence Lessig, John Palfrey, and Jonathan Zittrain.

“Are you admitting liability for all 30 sound recordings” on which the record labels brought suit, asked the plaintiffs’ attorney Tim Reynolds.

“Yes,” said Tenenbaum.

Tenenbaum then admitted that he “lied” in his written discovery responses, the ones in which he denied responsibility.

“Why did you lie at that point?” asked Tenenbaum’s attorney, Harvard Law School professor Charles Nesson. “It was kind of something I rushed through,” responded Tenenbaum. “It’s what seemed the best response to give.” At the time he gave the admittedly false discovery responses, Tenenbaum testified that he was being advised by his mother Judith, a family law attorney who works for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

It probably can’t be said that Mr. Tenenbaum’s attorney is ignorant of the law, or even that he is negligent (given that he’s volunteered to take the case and has given unusual attention to it). And given that this is his attorney’s question, it is quite clear that the questions and the responses were planned.

So, what’s their plan here?

If I had to take a guess, I am guessing their strategy is the exact opposite of Jammie Thomas, who was seen by two different juries as lying in the face of plain evidences (which could only imply that she thought the jury was stupid) and got hit with huge, punitive damages. That is, they are trying to say Mr. Tenenbaum is an honest guy. He might have given false representation earlier (not under oath), but that was a moment of weakness, and on the whole, he is an honest, average American who is being asked to pay $4,000 (if he settled) or upwards to $1 million (if the jury goes for maximum damage, like in the Jammie Thomas case). Now, does he really deserve to get punished like that for doing what an average American does?

Of course, if the jury sticks to the law and finds willful infringement (which may as well be the case, because Mr. Tenenbaum probably knew the songs were copyrighted and couldn’t have been unaware that what he was downloading were not authorized copies), then the minimum damage they can award is around $24,000, which is still quite a bit.

But here’s the real reason constitution guarantees a right to trial by jury of our peers: the jury does not have to “follow the law”, if they find the law unjust. This is a check on our legislative bodies by ordinary informed citizens. They cannot pass arbitrary, clearly unfair laws and expect the citizenry to uphold them. The jury is the final arbiter of facts in any trial, and if a clearly unbiased jury finds someone innocent, the legal professionals are very unwilling to question that fact as found by the jury (appeals are usually on the basis of technicalities and how the jury might have been led toward a particular bias).

Of course, the legal counsels on either side cannot mention jury nullification during the trial (if they do, they will probably be held in contempt of the court and the judge will instruct the jury to ignore the call to ignore the law), but so many unusual things happened with this trial, so who knows how it will end up?

We’ve discussed a few times over the years how copyright gets in the way of academic work. Journals (who get all of their writing and reviewing totally for free) insist on holding the copyright for those works in many cases. I’ve even heard of academics who had to redo pretty much the identical experiment because they couldn’t even cite their own earlier results for fear of a copyright claim. It leads to wacky situations where academics either ignore the fact that the journals they published in hold the copyright on their work, or they’re forced to jump through hoops to retain certain rights.

Oh, please. Data is not copyrighted. I am fairly sure they are not even copyrightable in most cases, even though a particular presentation of the data might be, especially if it shows some evidence of creativity. One must be either fairly stupid or have a really horrible legal department to get an idea that data in a published journal article is copyrighted and cannot re-use or even cite the data (who wouldn’t want citation? citation increases the impact factor of the journal) without “re-doing the experiment”. (Say, how does one know whether the “new data” is from new experiment or the old one? Aren’t they supposed to be the same within experimental error?)

Of course, I can only speak for the situation in physics, but I am fairly sure the situation is as bleak as presented in this page, at least not in natural sciences. APS (which does retain copyright) and Nature (which does not retain copyright) both allow the author to do pretty much whatever they want with the author-formatted preprints of the article. The allowances are less on the journal-produced, professional versions of the article, but that’s understandable (that particular copy represents the combined effort of the author and editor) and does not have that much impact on open access as long as one doesn’t mind the amateurish document formatting by many scientists (just look at arXiv.org).

On the whole, I do think copyright in U.S. does need to be reformed, and particularly so in academic journal publishing (textbooks have … different goals so it’s not so clear whether academic textbooks should be treated any differently from other books). But we will gain nothing by inciting unreasonable fear in the sheeple and eroding our own credibility. After all, don’t we believe that our cause is strong enough to prevail when we present the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth (as well as it can be determined from data and statistics, anyway) to the public?

The Narrative Fallacy writes “The Washington Post has an interesting profile on Barbara A. Ringer, who joined the Copyright Office at the Library of Congress in 1949 and spent 21 years drafting the legislation and lobbying Congress before the Copyright Act of 1976 was finally passed. Ringer wrote most of the bill herself. ‘Barbara had personal and political skills that could meld together the contentious factions that threatened to tear apart every compromise in the 20 year road to passage of the 1976 Act,’ wrote copyright lawyer William Patry. The act codified the fair use defense to copyright infringement. For the first time, scholars and reviewers could quote briefly from copyrighted works without having to pay fees. With the 1976 act that Ringer conceived, an author owned the copyright for his or her lifetime plus 50 years. Previously under the old 1909 law, an author owned the copyright for 28 years from the date of publication and unless the copyright was renewed, the work entered the public domain, and the author lost any right to royalties. Ringer received the President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service, the highest honor for a federal worker. Ringer remained active in copyright law for years, attending international conferences and filing briefs with the Supreme Court before her death earlier this year at age 83. ‘Her contributions were monumental,’ said Marybeth Peters, the Library of Congress’s current register of copyrights. ‘She blazed trails. She was a heroine.’”

Someone who worked on a copyright law that extended the duration to lifetime + 50 years a heroine? Clearly this submitter is on crack! (Or, as the case might be, heroin.)

Fair use existed before this law (in the “common law”, of course, but given the way U.S. court system works, the established body of case laws is as good as codified law), and if she had anything to do with this unconstitutional extension of copyright, she’s no hero in my eyes.

And as far as her “work” for which some idiots might consider her a “heroine”, it is at best unfinished. We need basis for fair use that doesn’t require you the legal expense of defending yourself first, as most of the times, you can’t get lawsuit dismissed on the basis of fair use, a poorly defined term; you first have to defend yourself in a full lawsuit that may go all the way up to the Supreme Courts.

Without that, fair use may as well not exist, since only those with a legal department (or enough money to hire lawyer for duration of the lawsuit) can use “fair use”, and those people can probably work out some kind of license for every incidental use they need anyway.

Patent and copyright law are stifling innovation and threatening the global economy according to two economists at Washington University in St. Louis in a new book, Against Intellectual Monopoly. Professors Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine call for abolishing the current patent and copyright system in order to unleash innovations necessary to reverse the current recession and rescue the economy. The professors discuss their stand against intellectual property protections in a video and news release linked here.

A good proposal, with one fatal mistake:

“They call on Congress to reverse the burden of the proof on patent seekers by granting patents only to those capable of proving that …”

The government should not be able to grant exemptions, at all. A system in which “intellectual property” has been abolished save by specific exceptions as deemed fit by the government has the worsts of looters’ government (as depicted in Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”, for one), with none of the benefits of the current system.

We need to abolish, or drastically reduce the scope of, copyright and patents uniformly and fairly. And the only way to do this fairly is by not involving the dirty, greedy hand of the government in the process of creating and maintaining a marketplace of ideas.

If those fancy pants don’t have enough courage to abolish copyright and patent monopoly altogether (again, with no exceptions, save by acts of God), then let us simply reduce their scope and power, say, to pre-1900 level.

There is one group of people not shocked by the record industry’s policy of suing randomly chosen file sharers: historians of copyright. They already know what everyone else is slowly finding out: that copyright was never about paying artists for their work, and that far from being designed to support creators, copyright was designed by and for distributors — that is, publishers, which today includes record companies….

To read the full article whose first few sentences are quoted above, click here. Otherwise, I encourage you to look around the site, and give this question a serious thought: “In today’s society, do we still need (if we ever did!) copyright?”

Don’t believe Cary Sherman, the president of the Recording Industry Association of America, when he told a National Public Radio audience that Sony BMG’s anti-piracy chief had misspoken during her testimony in the copyright infringement trial against Jammie Thomas.

And if Sherman was telling the truth during that NPR interview, Thomas was the victim of a miscarriage of justice—despite the mountain of evidence against her.

Oh, so recording industry spokespeople can answer to questions that they “believe” were asked, rather than the ones that they were actually asked, and not face perjury charges, eh? After all, people shouldn’t care about whether they understood the question when they are testifying under oath!

If that’s the standard to which that they are held, what grounds do they have to stand on when I tell them, straight-faced, that I believed I was downloading a legal copy? That I believed I had permission to make as many copies as I want, because that’s what my computer does in playing a CD—it makes a copy of the WAV in memory! Or are they saying that since making a copy is somehow a crime and wrong, that I can’t legally play a CD that I bought (that is, if I’m lame enough to buy CD).

There is a strong case for opposing intellectual property. Among other things, it often retards innovation and exploits Third World peoples. Most of the usual arguments for intellectual property do not hold up under scrutiny. In particular, the metaphor of the marketplace of ideas provides no justification for ownership of ideas. The alternative to intellectual property is that intellectual products not be owned, as in the case of everyday language. Strategies against intellectual property include civil disobedience, promotion of non-owned information, and fostering of a more cooperative society.

I know that Lessig makes a more nuanced argument and doesn’t try to push people too much. If you agree with him, then fine, you aren’t at least my enemy.

But, arguments laid out in this essay is much closer to what I believe. I have a dream that one day ideas will no longer be falsely claimed as properties. I have a dream that one day a man will abhor to commit a crime against humanity by claiming to own a part of culture. I dream of a copyright- and patent-free society.

As far as its usefulness goes, copyright served out its purpose and its welcome. And like slave labor, it must go.

Innocent consumers are being bothered by another round of the record industry behaving badly, via more lawsuits and anti-copying threats. This time, though, I’ve got a solution. We should do what we do to children who misbehave: Take away their privileges. Here’s the deal.

Er, I simply have to disagree with Mr. Wolfe.

The “punishment” he proposes is essentially equivalent to giving toy guns children who have been found to misuse real guns.

What he proposes as a “punishment” should have been the norm so … last century. It was already clear then that copyright was stifling innovation.

An appropriate punishment for misbehaving children will be taking the toy gun away and making him sit in the corner for 15 minutes. That would be, in real-world terms, putting the copyrighted work under dispute immediately in the public domain, as well as opening up possibilities for criminal suits against the abuser (if not an outright jail sentence).

That’s the punishment these immoral abusers of the public deserve.

P.S. And I would still say this is mild. In the old days, they would have been publicly flogged and then banished, if not a summary execution.

Nothing more than IP addresses sit at the foundation of most of the RIAA’s subpoenas and prelitigation letters, and the University of Washington says it has problems passing on legal threats based on them.

Although the amateur sysadmin in me says mapping a person to an IP is an easy task, the freedom-loving college student in me applauds the administration of these schools.

Really, it doesn’t matter how trivial the investigation is. RIAA, if they have any thread of conscience, even though it’s clear that they don’t, should do its own dirty work, not force innocent third party (school, as a general ISP, is protected by safe harbor provision of DMCA) or the government (RIAA tried to make DoJ bring civil suits on its behalf, I think).

“The unauthorized uploading or downloading of music is illegal. It is just as wrong as shoplifting from a local record store.” Well, beyond the question of legality (after all, RIAA wrote the damn law), I think it’s clear what’s more immoral: sharing (hopefully) good songs freely with others, or theft of the public domain by RIAA and media giants. Theft of the public domain by repeated retroactive extensions of copyright is utterly immoral, perhaps even more wrong than pilfering public coffers. Oh, they are in such a fine shape to discuss who’s committing a more grave wrong on whom.

Take this for an example. The morally-decrepit democrats want to give these scums “right to break any existing law” in order to protect their outdated business model and immoral practices. Under this situation, clearly only an idiot would take “the law” as defining what’s right, Socrates be damned.

Use your common sense. One group wants to share and share alike (to the public’s benefit), and another wants to hoard (for its own exorbitant profit to the public’s detriment) and break laws in order to continue hoarding. RIAA is immoral, and their agents, the democrats, are the devil’s tools.