CopyLeft
The CopyLeft movement is a diverse and growing alliance of artists, authors, activists, and legal theorists who are building an alternative to the current restrictive regime of intellectual property controls. The movement grows out of concerns over well-funded corporate strategies to privatize and commodify all human knowledge, creativity, and meaning. Corporate tactics include legal bullying (filing lawsuits against teenagers sharing movies or songs), neocolonial bioprospecting (genetically modifying and patenting seeds and other forms of life), and aggressive trademark and patent acquisition and protection (such as Fox News' famous lawsuit against Al Franken's use of the phrase "Fair and Balanced" in his 2003 book [1]).
The CopyLeft movement is the constructive policy proposal that was developed to provide a practical, tangible alternative to some of these corporate abuses. Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford University law professor and one of the leaders of the movement, describes some of the goals for authors and artists using electronic creations: "We have an explosion of technology inviting people to be creative" through mashups, sampling, compilations, and other techniques, "but the way the laws are written, all this activity is presumptively illegal. We want to move away from a maximalist position to create a future in which creativity can occur in a protected space without taking away anyone's rights." [2] Lessig's 2004 book, "Free Culture," inspired a group of students at Swarthmore to found Students for a Free Culture after they won a lawsuit against Diebold Election Systems; Diebold was found guilty of abusing copyright law for threatening the students after they posted a series of internal Diebold emails revealing widespread knowledge of flaws in the company's automated vote-counting software. Now the movement is gathering momentum, and one member of Students for Free Culture at USC noted, "Copyright should be a boring subject, but more and more people are realizing how big this is ... You mention the name Lawrence Lessig to the right people and they'll just go bananas." [3]
The intellectual and legal brain-trust of the CopyLeft movement is the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. Many of the movement's goals are implemented through Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization promoting flexible copyright licenses that allow authors (rather than corporate publishers and copyright/patent holding companies) to specify the permissible uses of their creative works. From the introduction of the Creative Commons protocol in 2003 to the Rio De Janeiro symposium of "an unusual global alliance of artists, scientists, and lawyers" in June, 2006, approximately 145 million creative works have been licensed; blogs account for the largest number of registrations, followed by images and then music. [4]
All items on this website for which I have rights and authority under copyright law are made available under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License. This means that you are free to distribute, copy, display, and/or perform the work, and to make derivative works, for commercial or non-commercial uses; but you must attribute the work to Elvin K. Wyly. For any reuse or redistribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. Any of these conditions can be waived with permission from the copyright holder. Note that your fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License. Here is a human-readable summary of the license, and here is a lawyer-readable license. For further information on the terms of Creative Commons licenses, send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.
References
[1] Al Franken (2003). Lies (And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them): A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. New York: Dutton/Penguin. Franken describes the origins of the book: "It all started when Harvard's Kennedy School of Government asked me to serve as a fellow at its Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. After my varied and celebrated career in television, movies, publishing, and the lucrative world of corporate speaking, being a fellow at Harvard seemed, frankly, like a step down. I couldn't think of anything less appealing than molding the minds of tomorrow's leaders ... To my surprise and delight, though, all Harvard wanted me to do was show up every once in a while and write something about something. That gave me an idea. 'Would it be okay if I wrote a scathingly partisan attack on the right-wing media and the Bush administration?' 'No problem,' Harvard said absentmindedly..." Franken (2003), p. xi-xii.
[2] Larry Rohter (2006). "Some Rights Reserved: Advocating Flexible Copyrights." New York Times, June 26, B1, B6.
[3] Rachel Aviv (2007). "File-Sharing Students Fight Copyright Constraints." New York Times, October 10, A21.
[4] Rohter, "Some Rights Reserved," B6.
[5] Lawrence Lessig (2009). "Against Transparency: The Perils of Openness in Government." The New Republic, October 9.
CopyLeft 2011 Elvin K. Wyly
Except where otherwise noted, this site is
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License
I am so absentminded that sometimes my left hand doesn't know what my far-left hand is doing. Swiped shamelessly, with the polarity reversed, from Ronald Reagan, who first offered the right-wing version of the joke in a 1981 speech to the Gridiron Club, quoted in Richard Reeves (2005). President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination. New York: Simon & Schuster, p. 33.
Beaverton, Oregon, August 2006 (Elvin Wyly)
"We will listen to free music, look at free art, watch free film and read free books ... We refuse to accept a future of digital feudalism." From the manifesto of Students for Free Culture, cited in Rachel Aviv (2007), "File-Sharing Students Fight Copyright Constraints." New York Times, October 10, A21.
Camden, New Jersey, July 2009 (Elvin Wyly)
Sunlight, Bananas, and Disinfectant
Not long before he joined the U.S. Supreme Court, Louis Brandeis wrote a book about corruption and conflicts of interest in the banking industry, and in making the case for public disclosure, he declared that "sunlight is...the best of disinfectants." This one-liner has become the mantra of an open-access and transparency movement that is allied with the CopyLeft movement. This movement is not without its internal diversity and disagreement. A few years ago, one of the members of Students for Free Culture at the University of Southern California enthused, "You mention the name Lawrence Lessig to the right people and they'll just go bananas." [3] But Lessig himself has had second thoughts. In an important and wide-ranging essay titled, "Against Transparency," Lessig questions the bold, unqualified emphasis on the provision of ever more public information on the assumption that more data will, in and of itself, be a public good. Lessig dubs this position the "naked transparency" argument, and he offers three reasons for reconsidering it, particularly for the case of information on various activities of the individuals and institutions of government. First, very little of today's automated internet-driven wave of public disclosure meets the standard of "targeted" transparency -- where key indicators are presented in way that is directly comparable, readily understood, and directly tied to a relevant decision, product, process, or other matter of interest. Instead, Lessig suggest, what we have is a flood of information that conceals rather than adding meaning. Second, the volume of newly disclosed information has itself become a serious threat to informed public discussion: the inescapable limits on the human attention span make it impossible to discern and discuss the subtleties of what particular kinds of observations mean, in a particular context: if the numerator of collective attention span remains fixed while the denominator of information expands exponentially, we find ourselves unable to engage in any kind of informed, knowledgable discussion or debate. Third, the political imperative for disclosure has created its own reflection, a political imperative in which information about disclosure itself becomes a site of controversy: in other words, the disclosure that someone is accused of something becomes a relevant piece of information that tarnishes reputations regardless of the veracity of the alleged impropriety. The visible spectrum of sunlight, then, comes along with the harmful ultraviolet rays of false accusations.
For Lessig, all of these dynamics worsen the problems of cynicism, and undermine the promises of a mature, reasoned, balanced approach to transparency. It's a subtle and sophisticated argument, although it is not without its flaws. First, Lessig completely overlooks the structural elements of the public/private divide: here we have a case for weakening public transparency without any regard for the ever-expanding privatized dossiers fueling postindustrial, post-material factions of informational capitalism and digital accumulation by dispossession. Intervene in the privatized digital exploitation and violence, and only then am I prepared to discuss a unilateral disarmament of public data disclosures. Second, Lessig's showcase example of disclosure-driven cynicism, morever, leads him to a point of resigned frustration, where he concludes that the only viable response is ... public funding of political campaigns. If this is where the train of naked transparency and cynicism gets us, let me climb on board!
These criticisms, however, are meant only in the spriit of truly constructive engagement. And there's so many wonderful insights and possibilities along the way, including the idea of the cultural flat rate and other forms of informational emancipation. And, most important of all, what do you think? If you're a student taking a class with me, then the principles and practices of CopyLeft should allow me to share the articles below with you for non-profit educational purposes. But several recent decisions at UBC make such fair use impossible. So track these down yourself, read them, and tell me what you think:
Lawrence Lessig (2009). "Against Transparency: The Perils of Openness in Government." The New Republic, October 9.
Adam McDowell (2010). "Copying, a Right." National Post, October 16, 2010, A6, A8.
If you want freedom, and if you want to be rebellious, subversive, efficient, productive and creative all at the same time, go to the library. To understand how revolutionary such an act can be, consider Lawrence Lessig's "For the Love of Culture":
".... I reached a critical part of the article. It referred to a table. I turned the page to see the table. The table was missing. In its place was a notice: 'The rightsholder did not grant rights to reproduce this item in electronic media.' No one had licensed the table for free distribution. Distribution was thus blocked. 'Have your lawyer call my lawyer,' the article seeming urged. 'We'll work something out.'"
"Before we release a gaggle of lawyers to police every quotation appearing in any book, can we stop for a moment to consider whether this way of organizing access to culture makes sense?"
"In real libraries, in real space, access is not metered at the level of the page (or the image on the page). ... You get to browse through the whole of the library, for free. You get to check out the books you want to read, for free. The real-space library is a den protected from the metering of the market. It is of course created within a market; but like kids in a playroom, we let the life inside the library ignore the market outside. This freedom gave us something real. It gave us the freedom to research, regardless of our wealth; the freedom to read, widely and technically, beyond our means. It was a way to assure that all of our culture was available and reachable -- not just that part that happens to be profitable to stock. It is a guarantee that we have the opportunity to learn about our past, even if we lack the will to do so."
-- Lawrence Lessig (2010). "For the Love of Culture: Google, Copyright, and Our Future." The New Republic, January 26.
CopyLeft Update
Fair Use is at risk. Battallions of intellectual property extortionists have, apparently, frightened UBC's Office of Legal Counsel, which has put faculty members on notice that they will be personally liable for copyright infringement claims. What is allowed under the exceptions to the Copyright Act and the doctrines of fair use and fair dealing?
It all depends. If there is one general principle, it seems to be this: if there is money to be made by interfering with your fair use and fair dealing rights, and someone is in a position of power to make good on that threat, then you can't do whatever it is you wanted to do.
Confused? Read this.
Now, if you've read all the materials at the link above, you're a year older and a lot more confused.