Web Surfers Dislike Copyright Crackdown -- Until Their Creations are Copied
Huge Cajones Remailer
Web Surfers Dislike Copyright Crackdown --
Until Their Creations are Copied
The Philadelphia Inquirer via Knight-Ridder/Tribune
12-12-96
By Reid Kanaley Knight-Ridder/Tribune Business News
Dec. 12 -- Misha Glouberman, who maintains a World Wide Web
page detailing what he sees as heavy-handed corporate
enforcement of copyrights in cyberspace, was shocked by his own
reaction when the tables were turned on him last month.
Glouberman had surfed to an Internet site titled, "Have Copyrights
Gone Too Far?" There, he found himself reading parts of his own
Web page.
"At first I was really, really upset. I was sort of mad. This guy had
stolen all my work," said Glouberman, 28, who lives in Toronto and
designs Web sites.
After his initial angry reaction, the irony hit him. "Here I am putting
up this Web page saying people who protect intellectual property are
whiners and bullies, and here I am all upset," he said in an interview.
In cyberspace, making copies of anything from words to pictures,
music and videos is a simple matter of mouse clicks. In fact, making
and storing digital copies of Web pages on far-flung computers --
called caching -- is done routinely to help speed up the Internet.
But the downside has grown increasingly clear to anyone who
publishes online -- as well as to many who never have, and yet find
their work duplicated without their permission on the Web and in
electronic newsgroups: Notions of copyright, trademark protection
and intellectual property sometimes seem irrelevant in cyberspace.
Just as an example, record executives for the Irish band U2 said in
November that two songs from an album that won't be released until
the spring were being illegally traded on the Internet.
And Twentieth Century Fox, which last year began cracking down on
Web sites where fans of "The Simpsons" were sharing pictures and
sound bites from the popular cartoon show, has now extended the
effort to fan sites for "The X-Files" and the new program
"Millennium," much to the consternation of fans.
"They promised legal action if I did not comply with their perfectly
reasonable and utterly sensible demands which, in a nutshell,
require that I 'cease and desist' blah blah blah," Steve Rapport, a
Berkeley, Calif., photographer, wrote on his now-mostly-empty
"Simpsons" Web page. "So, in my infinite wisdom, I have both
'ceased' and 'desisted.'"
"X-Files" and "Millennium" fans have mounted protests, suggesting
that Fox does not want competition for its own commercial Web
sites. But a lawyer for the corporation said the issue is simple.
"They're doing something that they shouldn't have done," said Fox's
counsel David Oakes.
While it's been said that on the Internet "information wants to be
free," many of the writers, artists and programmers who supply
information point out that "free" is never going to pay their bills.
"Much as we would like, as consumers, to have free access to
everything in the world, we can't, because there's no free lunch," said
James Gleick, author and New York Times Magazine columnist.
Gleick, who said that "stuff I write gets stolen all the time and posted
online," wrote an August column on the subject and titled it "I'll Take
the Money, Thanks."
Even many "cyber libertarians" such as Glouberman, who does his
Web page as a labor of love instead of for pay, acknowledge the
problem.
There have been get-tough moves -- from stern letters to lawsuits --
by content providers, software developers, and corporate owners of
everything from the recordings of Homer Simpson exclaiming,
"D'oh!" to the writings of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. Yet
these often generate more anger than compliance online.
"I thought it was really heavy-handed and unnecessary when what
you have is a bunch of fans with Web sites designed to increase the
popularity of the show," said Rapport, 40, who explained that he only
did a "Simpsons" page "because I like 'The Simpsons.'"
The two-year-old feud between the Church of Scientology and its
online critics is almost legendary. Waged in courtrooms on two
coasts and across the Internet, it has failed to stop repeated
postings that the church says are copyright and trade-secret
violations.
Glouberman said he sent a terse e-mail to the alleged plagiarist that
he encountered, but got no reply.
After Kmart this fall persuaded a disgruntled former employee to
alter the name and corporate logo on his Kmart Sucks home page,
the original page was promptly reposted, along with additional
commentary, by Glen L. Roberts, a 34-year-old writer and Internet
activist living in Western Pennsylvania.
"Without showing people what I'm talking about, what sense would
somebody make of my commentary?" Roberts asked. He said he
has heard nothing from Kmart.
Calls for new laws and tough penalties are echoing in Washington
and in international forums. In a diplomatic conference that opened
Dec. 2 and runs through Dec. 20 in Geneva, the World Intellectual
Property Organization is considering new copyright treaty language
that its authors say is needed for the Internet.
Critics, however, say the proposals under consideration go too far
and could make it illegal to quote a newspaper story in e-mail; would
turn the companies that provide Internet access into "copyright
police;" and could even make downloading a Web page to your
computer's memory -- which is the only way to view the Web -- a
copyright violation.
"What's interesting is just that it's even being proposed for rational
discussion," said Gerry J. Elman, a Media lawyer who teaches an
online college course on intellectual property and leads a
CompuServe forum on the subject.
James Love, director of Ralph Nader's Consumer Project on
Technology, said another proposal under consideration in Geneva --
to extend copyrights to individual facts in data bases -- would give
professional leagues ownership of sports statistics and stock
markets ownership of stock tables. News media that wanted to use
the numbers would have to get a license from the owners, he said.
While some tinkering with the law may be in order to protect the
"sweat-of-the-brow compilers" of online information, radical
proposals that seem to ignore the First Amendment and the concept
of "fair use" of copyright-protected material for review and
discussion "may be throwing the baby out with the bathwater," said
Elman.
Love said unauthorized reproduction of copyright-protected work
has gone on for years off the Internet, especially since the
proliferation of copy machines. The Internet is being singled out for
regulation only because it "makes such unauthorized uses very
transparent," he said.
Elman and many others suggest that education about copyrights
and the existing law is the biggest need. "There's a problem in that
the average person doesn't know whether or not the material is
protected by copyright."
Under copyright law in effect since 1989, no copyright symbol or
statement is necessary to affirm that material is protected. "The
default condition is that if you see anything on the Internet, it is
presumably protected by copyright, even if nobody is claiming
protection with a copyright notice," Elman said.
-----
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(c) 1996, The Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by
Knight-Ridder/Tribune Business News.
Tilman Hausherr
In <1996121800...@mailmasher.com>, nob...@huge.cajones.com (Huge
Cajones Remailer) wrote:
>The two-year-old feud between the Church of Scientology and its
>online critics is almost legendary. Waged in courtrooms on two
>coasts and across the Internet, it has failed to stop repeated
>postings that the church says are copyright and trade-secret
>violations.
This part is another evidence that there are no more trade "secrets" for
scientology.
Tilman